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There had been no “ad.” in the Sunday paper which would give a hint that any hotel needed additional help. We took our chances. Some twenty men waited in a little hallway, two women inside the little office. One of the women weighed at least two hundred and fifty, the other not a pound over ninety. Both could have been grandmothers, both wanted chamber work. The employment man spied me.
'Why? asked Kitty, in some wonder. 'Because, explained Calton, gravely, 'society goes mainly by tradition, and our grandmothers having laughed at Sydney Smith's jokes, they must necessarily be amusing. Depend upon it, jokes can be sanctified by time quite as much as creeds. 'They are more amusing, at all events, said Madame, satirically. 'Creeds generally cause quarrels.
Modern civilized society, on the other hand, preserves the health of many men and women and permits them to marry, and become parents who under the severities of savage life or of pioneer life would have died, and given way to others. On this I will not dwell; because these primeval ladies were not strictly our grandmothers, being farther removed.
Not so with some of their great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers, if history, sacred and profane, poetry, and the annals of literature testify aright; for it is comparatively a recent fact in history that the louse has awakened to find himself an outcast and an alien.
Our grandmothers lived in the kitchen, and debased their finer faculties to the creation of puddings and pies. They spun, they knitted, they mended, they darned, they kept the accounts of the household, and scolded the maids.
The scarlet hibiscus, child of the tropics, grows side by side with the aster of northern climes; the bougainvillæa flings out its purple sprays in close neighbourhood to the roses of old England; the sweet-william, dear to the hearts of our grandmothers, blooms in rich profusion in the shade of the pomegranate; and in brotherly companionship with the Norwegian pine the magnolia-tree unfolds its great creamy cups.
"What! without wives, or sisters, or mothers, or grandmothers, to say nothin' o' mothers-in-law, to cook our victuals an' look after our shirt-buttons?" said Isaac Martin, who, having been detained against his will, had become lugubriously, or recklessly, facetious, and was stimulated to a sort of fierce hilarity by his glass of rum.
It is a very unreasonable, foolish, clumsy sort of religion, this theology in wooden shoes; it is half grotesque, half pathetic; the grandmothers pass it on to the grandchildren as they pass the bowl of potatoes round the stove in the long winter nights; it is as silly as possible, but it comforts them as they carry fagots over the frozen canals or wear their eyes blind over the squares of lace; and it has in it the supreme pathos of any perfect confidence, of any utterly childlike and undoubting trust.
It was they who introduced smocked pinafores to you; and those modish patent-leather belts for children at which your grandmothers would have raised horrified hands. They taught you that an inch of hand embroidery is worth a yard of cheap lace. And as for style, cut, line you can tell a Horn & Udell child from among a flock of thirty.
The innocent simper of the British maiden has developed into the loud laugh and the horsey slang of the girl of the season. But maiden and matron are still on one point faithful to the traditions of their grandmothers, and front all censorious comers with a shrug of their shoulder-straps and a flutter of indignant womanhood.
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