It's worth living abroad to study up on genteel and delicate manners. The maid smiles continuously; she smiles like a duchess on a stage, while at the same time it is clear from her face that she is exhausted from overwork.
I wouldn't want to be reincarnated as a butler. I couldn't for the life of me do the job in real life.
It was implanted in me that I came from a different class - an elevated class. I was cushioned by servants. I don't remember doing anything for myself. I only played and went to school.
In the north we could not hope to keep the worst and poorest servant for a single day in the wretched discomfort in which our negro servants are forced habitually to live.
A pious woman's neighbor, a philanthropist's child, a liberal's servant--these three have a hard life.
Every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel.
My mother went to work in the homes of white folk, usually living in and looking after their children. The money was small.
There's nothing undignified about lying about all day and being waited on by servants, sipping bloody champagne.
My nan was a nursery maid. Most people weren't in big houses. They were maids of all work.
We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn't the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dressing, and she knows how life's lived before it gets to the parlor door.
My parents were born in Norfolk and spent their early years working in the big houses of that rural English county, my mother as a cook and my father as a handyman and chauffeur.
In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.
