" Thus I
find that delicate young women of gentle nurture have been sent away
to sleep in damp cellars at the back of great town-houses; they have
had to stay their necessarily fastidious appetites with cold broken
food--and this too after a weary vigil in the sick-room. Greatest
triumph of all, the nurses have been compelled to go as strangers to
the servants' table and make friends as best they could. It is not
easy to form any clear notion of a mind capable of devising such
useless indignities, because the shrew ought to know that her conduct
is contrasted with that of good and considerate people. The nurse
bears with composure all that is imposed on her, but she despises the
shabby woman, and she compares the behaviour of the acrid tyrant with
that of the majority of warm-hearted and generous ladies who think
nothing too good for their hired guests. I quote this extreme example
just to show how far the shrew is ready to go, and I wish it were not
all true.
Next let me deal with the mean shrew, who has one servant or more
under her control. The records of the servants' aid societies will
show plainly that there are women against whose names a significant
mark must be put, and the reason is that they turn away one girl after
another with incredible rapidity, or that despairing girls leave them
after finding life unendurable.
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