What is the homemaker of limited means, who must have some help, to do under present conditions? Well, meantime, there is only the young "general" for her, either the "daily girl" or one who "lives in." Of the two I prefer the "daily girl," when she can be obtained. And the younger she can be obtained, other things equal, the better. She will have fewer bad habits to overcome. Some housewives object to the daily girl on the score that she may bring dirt or infection from her home, and also because she can seldom arrive early enough to help get breakfast. But a little management overnight can reduce the labour of breakfast getting to a minimum, and if the "outings" of the girl who lives in are as frequent as they ought to be the risk of her carrying infection, etc., will always apply.

The "daily girl" has definitely fixed hours of work and the same chance of enjoying a measure of home life, of keeping her friends and individual interests, as the typist or factory worker whose lot the domestic servant so often envies; while her employers are not faced with the alternatives of condemning a young fellow-creature to a solitary existence or forcing an unreal companionship which is equally irksome on both sides. It is true that the wages of the "daily girl" do not equal, in actual money, those of the factory worker, neither does she obtain the Saturday half-holiday or the whole of Sunday free. But to set against this she receives her entire board and, with a kindly mistress, is not tied down to staying her full time on days when she is "forward" with her work.

The life of the young "daily girl," if her employer is a conscientious woman, need not be hard nor unpleasant; very little harder and no more unpleasant than the lot of the young "lady" who is paying from £60 to £80 per annum to learn cookery, laundry and housework at a school of domestic economy. Properly conducted, the relations between employer and employee, "mistress" and "servant," are those of mutual aid. Such relations may be, and too often are, those of an inefficient little drudge for a "mistress" almost equally ignorant and inefficient. But when the employer is an intelligent woman with a sense of justice (I prefer a sense of justice to sentimental theories about sisterhood - people do not always treat their sisters justly) the weekly money payment and food will be but a small part of the girl's wage. In addition she will receive a training that will equip her for the "higher" branches of domestic service, or for homemaking on her own account. Not every girl has the sense to appreciate this when she gets it, nor the intelligence to profit by it; while it is certainly rather trying to the employer when the girl is "all agog" to "better herself" as soon as she has gained a bare smattering of how to do certain things properly. But all this is "the fortune of war." Some girls never cease to be grateful to their first teachers and leave them reluctantly, while other girls never realise that they have anything to be grateful for. When gratitude and affection come they are pleasant to receive.

But the motive power of the really conscientious woman is not the expectation of gratitude or affection.

A word to the unconventional homemaker. The young "general" is a bird of passage. Age and experience bring with them the necessity of earning more, and if her first employer cannot periodically raise the girl's wages the latter must in time seek better paid employment, probably with a mistress who is not unconventional. It is unkind, therefore, to refrain from teaching the girl how she will be expected to do things in the ordinary conventional house. I do not mean that the employer ought to slavishly run her home on conventional lines for the instruction of her "help." But it is kinder, for instance, to help a girl regard a cap and apron with good-humoured indifference, or as on a par with a nurse's uniform, rather than as "a badge of servitude." It is kinder, too, to show her that it is not only "servants" who are expected to address their employers as "Sir" and "Ma'am," but that well-mannered young people in all conditions of life can be found who use this form of address to persons older than themselves. I do not suggest for one moment that any attempt should be made to delude a girl into the belief that she will not be expected, in conventional households, to behave with equal deference to persons younger than herself. Such deception would be unpardonable.

But it is anything but kind to allow a young girl to drift into careless and familiar habits of speech bound to lead to dismissal for "impudence" in her next "place." There is a type of person, for example, who seems to believe that, in order to show that he is "as good as anybody else," it is necessary to be rude and familiar. But good manners are not necessarily associated with servility. And it is no kindness to help to unfit a girl for getting her living in the world as it is.

It may seem that, in this article, I am more concerned for the "hired help" than the homemaker for whom I am ostensibly writing. But the points I have touched on are just those about which I know many thoughtful women are puzzled. I cannot solve their individual problems for them, of course, I can only just barely indicate some of the thoughts that have come to me on a subject that is so intimately bound up with the whole of our present unsatisfactory social and economic conditions that it cannot be adequately discussed in a little tract upon domestic economy.

Florence Daniel.