the pay is so much better and they are so much better housed and fed—and everything. Besides,” she added, with an irrelevance which always amuses her husband, though I should be alarmed by it for her sanity if I did not find it so characteristic of women here, who seem to be mentally characterized by the illogicality of the civilization, “they're not half so good as the foreign servants. They've been brought up in homes of their own, and they're uppish, and they have no idea of anything but third-rate boarding-house cooking, and they're always hoping to get married, so that, really, you have no peace of your life with them.”
“And it never seems to you that the whole relation is wrong?” I asked.
“What relation?”
“That between maid and mistress, the hirer and the hireling.”
“Why, good gracious!” she burst out. “Didn't Christ himself say that the laborer was worthy of his hire? And how would you get your work done, if you didn't pay for it?”
“It might be done for you, when you could not do it yourself, from affection.”
“From affection!” she returned, with the deepest derision. “Well, I rather think I shall have to do it myself if I want it done from affection! But I suppose you think I ought to do it myself, as the Altrurian ladies do! I can tell you that in America it would be impossible for a lady to do her own work, and there are no intelligence-offices where you can find girls that want to work for love. It's as broad as it's long.”
“It's simply business,” her husband said.
They were right, my dear friend, and I was wrong, strange as it must appear to you. The tie of service, which we think as sacred as the tie of blood, can be here only a business relation, and in these conditions service must forever be grudgingly given and grudgingly paid. There is something in it, I do not quite know what, for I can never place myself precisely in an American's place, that degrades the poor creatures who serve, so that they must not only be social outcasts, but must leave such a taint of dishonor on their work that one cannot even do it for one's self without a sense of outraged dignity. You might account for this in Europe, where ages of prescriptive wrong have distorted the relation out of all human wholesomeness and Christian loveliness; but in America, where many, and perhaps most, of those who keep servants and call them so are but a single generation from fathers who earned their bread by the sweat of their brows, and from mothers who nobly served in all household offices, it is in the last degree bewildering. I can only account for it by that bedevilment of the entire American ideal through the retention of the English economy when the English polity was rejected. But at the heart of America there is this ridiculous contradiction, and it must remain there until the whole country is Altrurianized. There is no other hope; but I did not now urge this point, and we turned to talk of other things, related to the matters we had been discussing.
“The men,” said Mrs. Makely, “get out of the whole bother very nicely, as long as they are single, and even when they're married they are apt to run off to the club when there's a prolonged upheaval in the kitchen.”
“I don't, Dolly,” suggested her husband.
“No, you don't, Dick,” she returned, fondly. “But there are not many like you.”
He went on, with a wink at me, “I never live at the club, except in summer, when you go away to the mountains.”
“Well, you know I can't very well take you with me,” she said.
“Oh, I couldn't leave my business, anyway,” he said, and he laughed.
X
I had noticed the vast and splendid club-houses in the best places in the city, and I had often wondered about their life, which seemed to me a blind groping towards our own, though only upon terms that forbade it to those who most needed it. The clubs here are not like our groups, the free association of sympathetic people, though one is a little more literary, or commercial, or scientific, or political than another; but the entrance to each is more or less jealously guarded; there is an initiation-fee, and there are annual dues, which are usually heavy enough to exclude all but the professional and business classes, though there are, of course, successful artists and authors in them. During the past winter I visited some of the most characteristic, where I dined and supped with the members, or came alone when one of these put me down, for a fortnight or a month.
They are equipped with kitchens and cellars, and their wines and dishes are of the best. Each is, in fact, like a luxurious private house on a large scale; outwardly they are palaces, and inwardly they have every feature and function of a princely residence complete, even to a certain number of guest-chambers, where members may pass the night, or stay indefinitely in some cases, and actually live at the club. The club, however, is known only to the cities and larger towns, in this highly developed form; to the ordinary, simple American of the country, or of the country town of five or ten thousand people, a New York club would be as strange as it would be to any Altrurian.
“Do many of the husbands left behind in the summer live at the club?” I asked.
“All that have a club do,” he said. “Often there's a very good table d'hôte dinner that you couldn't begin to get for the same price anywhere else; and there are a lot of good fellows there, and you can come pretty near forgetting that you're homeless, or even that you're married.”
He laughed, and his wife said: “You ought to be ashamed, Dick; and me worrying about you all the time I'm away, and wondering what the cook gives you here. Yes,” she continued, addressing me, “that's the worst thing about the clubs. They make the men so comfortable that they say it's one of the principal obstacles to early marriages. The young men try to get lodgings near them, so that they can take their meals there, and they know they get much better things to eat than they could have in a house of their own at a great deal more expense, and so they simply don't think of getting married. Of course,” she said, with that wonderful, unintentional, or at least unconscious, frankness of hers, “I don't blame the clubs altogether. There's no use denying that girls are expensively brought up, and that a young man has to think twice before taking one of them out of the kind of home she's used to and putting her into the kind of home he can give her. If the clubs have killed early marriages, the women have created the clubs.”
“Do women go much to them?” I asked, choosing this question as a safe one.
“Much!” she screamed. “They don't go at all! They can't! They won't let us! To be sure, there are some that have rooms where ladies can go with their friends who are members, and have lunch or dinner; but as for seeing the inside of the club-house proper, where these great creatures”—she indicated her husband—“are sitting up, smoking and telling stories, it isn't to be dreamed of.”
Her husband laughed. “You wouldn't like the smoking, Dolly.”
“Nor the stories, some of them,” she retorted.
“Oh, the stories are always first-rate,” he said, and he laughed more than before.
“And they never gossip at the clubs, Mr. Homos—never!” she added.
“Well, hardly ever,” said her husband, with an intonation that I did not understand. It seemed to be some sort of catch-phrase.
“All I know,” said Mrs. Makely, “is that I like to have my husband belong to his club. It's a nice place for him in summer;
