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Updated: May 7, 2025
The Counsellor did not say all this quite so formally as I have set it down here, but in a much easier way. In fact, it is impossible to smooth out a conversation from memory without stiffening it; you can't have a dress shirt look quite right without starching the bosom. Some of us would have liked to hear more about those letters in the divorce cases, but the Counsellor had to leave the table.
The more accurate statement would be that she did her own laundry, including the processes, not only of rubbing the clothes clean, but of boiling, starching, bluing, and ironing. This, after a day of standing in other employment, is a vital strain more severe than may perhaps be readily realized.
She knew all the secrets of clear starching, and taught the ignorant how to do their work through her educated intelligence. She had, however, native Americans to teach, and not Irish, Germans, or Swedes. Now, few native-born Americans will become servants, and the difficulties of the mistress are thereby increased. A servant cannot be too carefully taught her duty to visitors.
"In the next best-paid work after hand starching, the work of hand ironing, paying roughly from $8 to $18 a week, Italian women are practically never employed. "The worst part of mangle work, the shaking, is done by young girls and by incapable older women of many nationalities.
Doubtful men and women were forcibly dragged to her by laughing companions and made to touch her skin. At meal times she was on exhibition to a favoured few, who watched how she ate and drank, and then described the operations to the others outside. Day by day she prescribed and bandaged, cut out garments, superintended washing, and initiated women into the secrets of starching and ironing.
There is a wonderful laundry in this Home, where the most beautiful washing is done at extremely moderate prices. The ironing and starching room was a busy sight, but what I chiefly remember about it was the spectacle of one melancholy old man, the only male among that crowd of women, seated by a steam-boiler that drove the machinery, to which it was his business to attend.
Repetto got some material for us; but it is poor stuff and rather expensive. Monday, December l6. Every one is busy preparing for Christmas. There's much blueing and starching of clothes. We were up early as we have started house-cleaning. Tuesday, December l7. The kitchen was whitewashed before breakfast, and the passage this afternoon.
Her Flemish thrift has set her to the washing and clear starching of the lawyers' ruffs, whereby she makes enough to supply the defects of my scanty days, or when I have to follow my lord's grace out of her reach, sweet soul. There's my tale, nevoys. And now, have ye a hand for Quipsome Hal?" "O uncle! Father would have honoured thee!" cried Stephen.
There came a few busy days of stitching and starching, and crimping and packing, and then, in the last of June, they would be off. They were to go on Monday. The Haddens came over on Saturday afternoon, just as Leslie had nearly put the last things into her trunk, a new trunk, quite her own, with her initials in black paint upon the russet leather at each end.
She was afraid she would never attain to the fluctuations of price in the fish market in different seasons of the year, the starching of muslins, the time it took to cook a pudding, and how much sugar went to a pot of preserved fruit; and her mother destroyed the last remnant of self-confidence when half-pityingly, half-contemptuously she told her that she was not sufficiently developed to understand such things.
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