Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 9, 2025
Isabel was never a cook. In the many servantless gaps of domestic life in Orchardina, there was always a strained atmosphere in the Porne household. "Dear," said Mr. Porne, "might I petition to have the steak less cooked? I know you don't like to do it, so why not shorten the process?" "I'm sorry," she answered, "I always forget about the steak from one time to the next."
Everywhere were the cruel signs of destruction and want in scanty larder, patched, refurbished clothing, servantless homes in dismantled outhouses, broken fences and neglected, brier-choked fields. Even the staples of life were fast diminishing for every man who could shoulder a gun had gone to fight with Lee, and few animals were left and fewer slaves.
It happened that Bessie was just now servantless. There was Mr. Scawthorne's breakfast only half prepared; Jane had to see to it herself, and herself take it upstairs. Then Bessie must go to bed, or assuredly she would be so ill that unheard-of calamities would befall the infants. Jane would have an eye to everything; only let Jane be trusted.
Of course, when I arose to take away the fruit-plates and bring on the breakfast, the fact that I was servantless came out. To the Philosopher and the Skeptic, who were immediately solicitous, I explained that we should get on very well. "We'll see that you do," promised the Skeptic. "There are a few things I flatter myself I can do as well as the next man or woman. Consider me at your service."
For months, Mabel had been servantless in the big house, keeping the home together in penury for her ineffectual brothers. She had kept house for ten years. But previously, it was with unstinted means. Then, however brutal and coarse everything was, the sense of money had kept her proud, confident.
People who have been brought up in households where there is an organized under-world of servants are incurably different in their social outlook from those who have passed a servantless childhood. They never quite emancipate themselves from the conception of an essential class difference, of a class of beings inferior to themselves. They may theorise about equality but theory is not belief.
It was a servantless period. But there was a light in the servants' living-room, and the red comforting glow of a fire. The bailiff lived there. Robert could hear him shuffling his feet in the fender, and sniffing and clearing his throat as though the silence bothered him, and he were trying to make himself at home.
She drew humorous pictures of the comic shifts, the almost tragic hardships of life on the Leura how she had been left servantless until Ninnis had got up Maggie from the Lower Leura when the Chinamen decamped during the gold rush.
It must have been ebbing for a long time before she realized it because, hurried, absorbed, surrounded incessantly by small cares as she was, hustled and jostled in her rôle of mother and mistress-of-the-house in servantless America, with the primitive American need to do so much with her own hands, she had not even had the time to know the stupid, tragic thing that was happening to her . . . that she was turning into a slow, vegetating plant instead of a human being.
Energetic boys, who want to return to Japan as soon as possible, or, mayhap, buy a farm, make a hundred dollars a month by getting up at five in the morning to wash a certain number of stoops and sweep sidewalks, cook a breakfast and wash up the dinner dishes in one servantless household, the lunch dishes in another, clean up generally in another, cook the dinner, wait on the table, clean up in still another.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking