What Diantha Did. By Charlotte Perkins Gilman. (T. Fisher Unwin.
4s. 6d, not.)—Diantha, in the small American town of Orchardina, invents an excellent plan for solving the problem of domestic service by making all servants what would be called at school "day boys." They live in hostels and give so many hours' work for so much money. The mouth of the English housewife will water at the account of Diantha's scheme of cooked food delivery, and any one who has ever tried to have a dinner supplied from outside in London will envy the inhabitants of Orchardine, the beautiful little cases of silver-plated aluminium in which their lunches and dinners arrive. It is, however, ridicu- lous to contend that the domestic problem is solved by these devices. Even when Diantha herself lives in a house four miles from the town she finds it quite impossible to have her maids in by the day, and has to have recourse to a Chinaman. Tho English housewives have no such resource, and it seems probable that they will go on in their old way for some years to come, for they are much less fond than are Americans of living in towns. One unfortunate feature of all these plans is that they must have a person with a genius for organization at the head of them, and those persons are not easily procured. Diantha would never have succeeded if her day servants and the food had not both been absolutely perfect, one in capacity and the other in quality.
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