While they gossiped about it among themselves, Powell says neither she nor any other servant would have dreamed of telling another member of the aristocracy or a newspaper about anything their employers did. "Employers constantly, by the things they talked about in front of servants, left themselves open to blackmail," Powell writes. "But we would never have known how to set about it.... [W]e had a feeling that what they upstairs did, although it was a subject of scandal and gossip and laughter, was their privilege. Not because they were better than us, but because they had money and it was no good having money if you couldn't deviate from the norm."
