Lady
Mason, as she crept silently across the hall, saw a servant girl pass
down towards the entrance to the kitchen, and would have given all,
all that she had in the world, to change places with that girl. But no
change was possible to her. Neither would the mountains crush her, nor
the earth take her in. This was her burden, and she must,' etc., etc.
You enjoyed the wondrous bathos? Of course. And yet there wasn't any
bathos at all, really. At least, there wasn't any in 1862, when `Orley
Farm' was published. Servants really were `most desolate' in those
days, and `their sufferings' were less acute only than those of
gentlewomen who had forged wills. This is an exaggerated view? Well it
was the view held by gentlewomen at large, in the 'sixties. Trust
Trollope.
Why to a modern gentlewoman would it seem so much more dreadful to be
crushed by mountains and swallowed by earthquakes than to be a servant
girl passing down towards the entrance to the kitchen? In other words,
how is it that servants have so much less unpleasant a time than they
were having half-a-century ago? I should like to think this
melioration came through our sense of justice, but I cannot claim that
it did. Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till
long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly
aroused; nor is it ever up and doing till those others have begun to
make themselves thoroughly disagreeable, and not even then will it be
up and doing more than is urgently required of it by our convenience
at the moment.
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