The servant may do what I call the heavy kitchen-work, such as preparing vegetables for cooking, chopping meat, peeling potatoes, etc., and she should always be allowed to wash pots, pans and kettles, after the cooking is done.
But if the mistress will spend half an hour in the kitchen before each meal, John will soon discover that his food has a delicacy of flavor and is served with a daintiness imparted only by a professional French cook,--or a lady.
Another of the petty economies which is not belittling is the washing of one's own dining-room dishes.

The money saved by this process is easily understood by the housewife whose cut-glass and egg-shell china are continually smashed to fragments by the hirelings whose own the fragiles are not.

The china bill for one year of the woman with many servants assumes proportions so huge that she is actually afraid to let herself consider its enormity.

And there are still more things broken of which she is never told until the day comes when this or that article is needed, and the answer to inquiry is: "An' sure ma'am, such a thing aint niver been in this house sence iver I come into it." And as there is no way of proving the falsity of this statement, one must submit.
As I have said before, dish-washing, as done by a lady, takes little time and labor, and may be a pleasant occupation.

The laborer, not the labor, makes a thing common or refined.