Page:Addams - 1902 - Democracy and Social Ethics.djvu/136

 life are altered. This change may be wholesome for her, but it is not easy, and thought of the savings-bank does not cheer one much, when one is twenty. She is isolated from the people with whom she has been reared, with whom she has gone to school, and among whom she expects to live when she marries. She is naturally lonely and constrained away from them, and the "new maid" often seems "queer" to her employer's family. She does not care to mingle socially with the people in whose house she is employed, as the girl from the country often does, but she suffers horribly from loneliness.

This wholesome, instinctive dread of social isolation is so strong that, as every city intelligence-office can testify, the filling of situations is easier, or more difficult, in proportion as the place offers more or less companionship. Thus, the easy situation to fill is always the city house, with five or six employees, shading off into the more difficult suburban home, with two,