But this story must tell the whole truth which lay beneath that fond acquiescing smile.

Elizabeth was certainly in good health, being well fed, well housed, and leading on the whole an easy life; happy, too, when she looked at Miss Hilary.  But her migration from Mrs. Jones’s lodgings to this grand mansion had not been altogether the translation from Purgatory to Paradise that some would have supposed.

The author of this simple story having—­unfortunately for it—­never been in domestic service, especially in the great houses of London, does not pretend to describe the ins and outs of their “high life below stairs;” to repeat kitchen conversations, to paint the humors of the servants’ hall—­the butler and housekeeper getting tipsy together, the cook courting the policeman, and the footman making love successively to every house-maid and ladys’-maid.  Some writers have depicted all this, whether faithfully or not they know best; but the present writer declines to attempt any thing of the kind.  Her business is solely with one domestic, the country girl who came unexpectedly into this new world of London servant-life—­a world essentially its own, and a life of which the upper classes are as ignorant as they are of what goes on in Madagascar and Otabeite.

This fact was the first which struck the unsophisticated Elizabeth.  She, who had been brought up in a sort of feudal relationship to her dear mistresses, was astonished to find the domestics of Russell Square banded together into a community which, in spite of their personal bickerings and jealousies, ended in alliance offensive and defensive against the superior powers, whom they looked upon as their natural enemies.  Invisible enemies, certainly; for “master” they hardly ever saw; and, excepting the ladys’ maid, were mostly as ignorant of “missis.”  The housekeeper was the middle link between the two estates—­the person with whom all business was transacted, and to whom all complaints had to be made.  Beyond being sometimes talked over, generally in a quizzical, depreciatory, or condemnatory way, the heads of the establishment were no more to their domestics than the people who paid wages, and exacted in return certain duties, which most of them made as small as possible, and escaped whenever they could.

If this be an exaggerated picture of a state of things perhaps in degree inevitable—­and yet it should not be, for it is the source of incalculable evil, this dividing of a house against itself—­if I have in any way said what is not true, I would that some intelligent “voice from the kitchen” would rise up and tell us what is true, and whether it be possible on either side to find means of amending what so sorely needs reformation.

Elizabeth sometimes wanted Tom Cliffe to do this—­to “write a book,” which he, eager young malcontent, was always threatening to do, upon the evils of society, and especially the tyranny of the upper classes.  Tom Cliffe was the only person to whom she imparted her troubles and perplexities:  how different her life was from that she had been used to; how among her fellow-servants there was not one who did not seem to think and act in a manner totally opposed to every thing she had learned from Miss Hilary.  How consequently she herself was teased, bullied, threatened, or at best “sent to Coventry,” from morning till night.