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Through the Eye of the Needle: A Romance, a novel by William Dean Howells |
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Part First - Chapter 6 |
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_ PART FIRST CHAPTER VI When we were again seated in the drawing-room, which she had been so near calling a parlor, she continued to bubble over with delight in herself and her apartment. "Now, isn't it about perfect?" she urged, and I had to own that it was indeed very convenient and very charming; and in the rapture of the moment she invited me to criticise it. "I see very little to criticise," I said, "from your point of view; but I hope you won't think it indiscreet if I ask a few questions?" She laughed. "Ask anything, Mr. Homos! I hope I got hardened to your questions in the mountains." "She said you used to get off some pretty tough ones," said her husband, helpless to take his eyes from her, although he spoke to me. "It is about your servants," I began. "Oh, of course! Perfectly characteristic! Go on." "You told me that they had no natural light either in the kitchen or their bedroom. Do they never see the light of day?" The lady laughed heartily. "The waitress is in the front of the house several hours every morning at her work, and they both have an afternoon off once a week. Some people only let them go once a fortnight; but I think they are human beings as well as we are, and I let them go every week." "But, except for that afternoon once a week, your cook lives in electric-light perpetually?" "Electric-light is very healthy, and it doesn't heat the air!" the lady triumphed, "I can assure you that she thinks she's very well off; and so she is." I felt a little temper in her voice, and I was silent, until she asked me, rather stiffly, "Is there any _other_ inquiry you would like to make?" "Yes," I said, "but I do not think you would like it." "Now, I assure you, Mr. Homos, you were never more mistaken in your life. I perfectly delight in your naivete. I know that the Altrurians don't think as we do about some things, and I don't expect it. What is it you would like to ask?" "Well, why should you require your servants to go down on a different elevator from yourselves?" "Why, good gracious!" cried the lady.--"aren't they different from us in _every_ way? To be sure, they dress up in their ridiculous best when they go out, but you couldn't expect us to let them use the _front_ elevator? I don't want to go up and down with my own cook, and I certainly don't with my neighbor's cook!" "Yes, I suppose you would feel that an infringement of your social dignity. But if you found yourself beside a cook in a horse-car or other public conveyance, you would not feel personally affronted?" "No, that is a very different thing. That is something we cannot control. But, thank goodness, we can control our elevator, and if I were in a house where I had to ride up and down with the servants I would no more stay in it than I would in one where I couldn't keep a dog. I should consider it a perfect outrage. I cannot understand you, Mr. Homos! You are a gentleman, and you must have the traditions of a gentleman, and yet you ask me such a thing as that!" I saw a cast in her husband's eye which I took for a hint not to press the matter, and so I thought I had better say, "It is only that in Altruria we hold serving in peculiar honor." "Well," said the lady, scornfully, "if you went and got your servants from an intelligence-office, and had to look up their references, you wouldn't hold them in very much honor. I tell you they look out for their interests as sharply as we do for ours, and it's nothing between us but a question of--" "Business," suggested her husband. "Yes," she assented, as if this clinched the matter. "That's what I'm always telling you, Dolly, and yet you _will_ try to make them your friends, as soon as you get them into your house. You want them to love you, and you know that sentiment hasn't got anything to do with it." "Well, I can't help it, Dick. I can't live with a person without trying to like them and wanting them to like me. And then, when the ungrateful things are saucy, or leave me in the lurch as they do half the time, it almost breaks my heart. But I'm thankful to say that in these hard times they won't be apt to leave a good place without a good reason." "Are there many seeking employment?" I asked this because I thought it was safe ground. "Well, they just stand around in the office as _thick!_" said the lady. "And the Americans are trying to get places as well as the foreigners. But I won't have Americans. They are too uppish, and they are never half so well trained as the Swedes or the Irish. They still expect to be treated as one of the family. I suppose," she continued, with a lingering ire in her voice, "that in Altruria you do treat them as one of the family?" "We have no servants, in the American sense," I answered, as inoffensively as I could. Mrs. Makely irrelevantly returned to the question that had first provoked her indignation. "And I should like to know how much worse it is to have a back elevator for the servants than it is to have the basement door for the servants, as you always do when you live in a separate house?" "I should think it was no worse," I admitted, and I thought this a good chance to turn the talk from the dangerous channel it had taken. "I wish, Mrs. Makely, you would tell me something about the way people live in separate houses in New York." She was instantly pacified. "Why, I should be delighted. I only wish my friend Mrs. Bellington Strange was back from Europe; then I could show you a model house. I mean to take you there, as soon as she gets home. She's a kind of Altrurian herself, you know. She was my dearest friend at school, and it almost broke my heart when she married Mr. Strange, so much older, and her inferior in every way. But she's got his money now, and oh, the good she does do with it! I know you'll like each other, Mr. Homos. I do wish Eva was at home!" I said that I should be very glad to meet an American Altrurian, but that now I wished she would tell me about the normal New York house, and what was its animating principle, beginning with the basement door. She laughed and said, "Why, it's just like any other house!" _ |
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