and while lady harman was making these meritorious and industrious attempts to grasp the significance of life and to get some clear idea of her social duty, the developments of those hostels she had started—she now felt so prematurely—was going on. there were times when she tried not to think of them, turned her back on them, fled from them, and times when they and what she ought to do about them and what they ought to be and what they ought not to be, filled her mind to the exclusion of every other topic. rigorously and persistently sir isaac insisted they were hers, asked her counsel, demanded her appreciation, presented as it were his recurring bill for them.
five of them were being built, not four but five. there was to be one, the largest, in a conspicuous position in bloomsbury near the british museum, one in a conspicuous position looking out upon parliament hill, one conspicuously placed upon the waterloo road near st. george's circus, one at sydenham, and one in the kensington road which was designed to catch the eye of people going to and fro to the various exhibitions at olympia.
in sir isaac's study at putney there was a huge and rather splendid-looking morocco portfolio on a stand, and this portfolio bore in excellent gold lettering the words, international bread and cake hostels. it was her husband's peculiar pleasure after dinner to take her to turn over this with him; he would sit pencil in hand, while she, poised at his request upon the arm of his chair, would endorse a multitude of admirable modifications and suggestions. these hostels were to be done—indeed they were being done—by sir isaac's tame architect, and the interlacing yellow and mauve tiles, and the doulton ware mouldings that were already familiar to the public as the uniform of the stores, were to be used upon the façades of the new institutions. they were to be boldly labelled
international hostels
right across the front.
the plans revealed in every case a site depth as great as the frontage, and the utmost ingenuity had been used to utilize as much space as possible.
"every room we get in," said sir isaac, "adds one to the denominator in the cost;" and carried his wife back to her schooldays. at last she had found sense in fractions. there was to be a series of convenient and spacious rooms on the ground floor, a refectory, which might be cleared and used for meetings—"dances," said lady harman. "hardly the sort of thing we want 'em to get up to," said sir isaac—various offices, the matron's apartments—"we ought to begin thinking about matrons," said sir isaac;—a bureau, a reading-room and a library—"we can pick good, serious stuff for them," said sir isaac, "instead of their filling their heads with trash"—one or two workrooms with tables for cutting out and sewing; this last was an idea of susan burnet's. upstairs there was to be a beehive of bedrooms, floor above floor, and each floor as low as the building regulations permitted. there were to be long dormitories with cubicles at three-and-sixpence a week—make your own beds—and separate rooms at prices ranging from four-and-sixpence to seven-and-sixpence. every three cubicles and every bedroom had lavatory basins with hot and cold water; there were pull-out drawers under the beds and a built-in chest of drawers, a hanging cupboard, a looking-glass and a radiator in each cubicle, and each floor had a box-room. it was ship-shape.
"a girl can get this cubicle for three-and-six a week," said sir isaac, tapping the drawing before him with his pencil. "she can get her breakfast with a bit of bacon or a sausage for two shillings a week, and she can get her high tea, with cold meat, good potted salmon, shrimp paste, jam and cetera, for three-and-six a week. say her bus fares and lunch out mean another four shillings. that means she can get along on about twelve-and-six a week, comfortable, read the papers, have a book out of the library.... there's nothing like it to be got now for twice the money. the sort of thing they have now is one room, dingy, badly fitted, extra for coals.
"that's the answer to your problem, elly," he said. "there we are. every girl who doesn't live at home can live here—with a matron to keep her eye on her.... and properly run, elly, properly run the thing's going to pay two or three per cent,—let alone the advertisement for the stores.
"we can easily make these hostels obligatory on all our girls who don't live at their own homes," he said. "that ought to keep them off the streets, if anything can. i don't see how even miss babs wheeler can have the face to strike against that.
"and then we can arrange with some of the big firms, drapers' shops and all that sort of thing near each hostel, to take over most of our other cubicle space. a lot of them—overflow.
"of course we'll have to make sure the girls get in at night." he reached out for a ground floor plan of the bloomsbury establishment which was to be the first built. "if," he said, "we were to have a sort of porter's lodge with a book—and make 'em ring a bell after eleven say—just here...."
he took out a silver pencil case and got to work.
lady harman's expression as she leant over him became thoughtful.
there were points about this project that gave her the greatest misgivings; that matron, keeping her eye on the girls, that carefully selected library, the porter's bell, these casual allusions to "discipline" that set her thinking of scraps of the babs wheeler controversy. there was a regularity, an austerity about this project that chilled her, she hardly knew why. her own vague intentions had been an amiable, hospitable, agreeably cheap establishment to which the homeless feminine employees in london could resort freely and cheerfully, and it was only very slowly that she perceived that her husband was by no means convinced of the spontaneity of their coming. he seemed always glancing at methods for compelling them to come in and oppressions when that compulsion had succeeded. there had already hovered over several of these anticipatory evenings, his very manifest intention to have very carefully planned "rules." she felt there lay ahead of them much possibility for divergence of opinion about these "rules." she foresaw a certain narrowness and hardness. she herself had made her fight against the characteristics of sir isaac and—perhaps she was lacking in that aristocratic feeling which comes so naturally to most successful middle-class people in england—she could not believe that what she had found bad and suffocating for herself could be agreeable and helpful for her poorer sisters.
it occurred to her to try the effect of the scheme upon susan burnet. susan had such a knack of seeing things from unexpected angles. she contrived certain operations upon the study blinds, and then broached the business to susan casually in the course of an enquiry into the welfare of the burnet family.
susan was evidently prejudiced against the idea.
"yes," said susan after various explanations and exhibitions, "but where's the home in it?"
"the whole thing is a home."
"barracks i call it," said susan. "nobody ever felt at home in a room coloured up like that—and no curtains, nor vallances, nor toilet covers, nor anywhere where a girl can hang a photograph or anything. what girl's going to feel at home in a strange place like that?"
"they ought to be able to hang up photographs," said lady harman, making a mental note of it.
"and of course there'll be all sorts of rules."
"some rules."
"homes, real homes don't have rules. and i daresay—fines."
"no, there shan't be any fines," said lady harman quickly. "i'll see to that."
"you got to back up rules somehow—once you got 'em," said susan. "and when you get a crowd, and no father and mother, and no proper family feeling, i suppose there's got to be rules."
lady harman pointed out various advantages of the project.
"i'm not saying it isn't cheap and healthy and social," said susan, "and if it isn't too strict i expect you'll get plenty of girls to come to it, but at the best it's an institution, lady harman. it's going to be an institution. that's what it's going to be."
she held the front elevation of the bloomsbury hostel in her hand and reflected.
"of course for my part, i'd rather lodge with nice struggling believing christian people anywhere than go into a place like that. it's the feeling of freedom, of being yourself and on your own. even if the water wasn't laid on and i had to fetch it myself.... if girls were paid properly there wouldn't be any need of such places, none at all. it's the poverty makes 'em what they are.... and after all, somebody's got to lose the lodgers if this place gets them. suppose this sort of thing grows up all over the place, it'll just be the story of the little bakers and little grocers and all those people over again. why in london there are thousands of people just keep a home together by letting two or three rooms or boarding someone—and it stands to reason, they'll have to take less or lose the lodgers if this kind of thing's going to be done. nobody isn't going to build a hostel for them."
"no," said lady harman, "i never thought of them."
"lots of 'em haven't anything in the world but their bits of furniture and their lease and there they are stuck and tied. there's aunt hannah, father's sister, she's like that. sleeps in the basement and works and slaves, and often i've had to lend her ten shillings to pay the rent with, through her not being full. this sort of place isn't going to do much good to her."
lady harman surveyed the plan rather blankly. "i suppose it isn't."
"and then if you manage this sort of place easy and attractive, it's going to draw girls away from their homes. there's girls like alice who'd do anything to get a bit of extra money to put on their backs and seem to think of nothing but chattering and laughing and going about. such a place like this would be fine fun for alice; in when she liked and out when she liked, and none of us to ask her questions. she'd be just the sort to go, and mother, who's had the upbringing of her, how's she to make up for alice's ten shillings what she pays in every week? there's lots like alice. she's not bad isn't alice, she's a good girl and a good-hearted girl; i will say that for her, but she's shallow, say what you like she's shallow, she's got no thought and she's wild for pleasure, and sometimes it seems to me that that's as bad as being bad for all the good it does to anyone else in the world, and so i tell her. but of course she hasn't seen things as i've seen them and doesn't feel as i do about all these things...."
thus susan.
her discourse so puzzled lady harman that she bethought herself of mr. brumley and called in his only too readily accorded advice. she asked him to tea on a day when she knew unofficially that sir isaac would be away, she showed him the plans and sketched their probable development. then with that charming confidence of hers in his knowledge and ability she put her doubts and fears before him. what did he really think of these places? what did he think of susan burnet's idea of ruined lodging-house keepers? "i used to think our stores were good things," she said. "is this likely to be a good thing at all?"
mr. brumley said "um" a great number of times and realized that he was a humbug. he fenced with her and affected sagacity for a time and suddenly he threw down his defences and confessed he knew as little of the business as she did. "but i see it is a complex question and—it's an interesting one too. may i enquire into it for you? i think i might be able to hunt up a few particulars...."
he went away in a glow of resolution.
georgina was about the only intimate who regarded the new development without misgiving.
"you think you're going to do all sorts of things with these hostels, ella," she said, "but as a matter of fact they're bound to become just exactly what we've always wanted."
"and what may that be?" asked mrs. sawbridge over her macramé work.
"strongholds for a garrison of suffragettes," said georgina with the light of the great insane movement in her eyes and a ringing note in her voice. "fort chabrols for women."
6
for some months in a negative and occasionally almost negligent fashion mr. brumley had been living up to his impassioned resolve to be an unselfish lover of lady harman. he had been rather at loose ends intellectually, deprived of his old assumptions and habitual attitudes and rather chaotic in the matter of his new convictions. he had given most of his productive hours to the writing of a novel which was to be an entire departure from the euphemia tradition. the more he got on with this, the more clearly he realized that it was essentially insignificant. when he re-read what he had written he was surprised by crudities where he had intended sincerities and rhetoric where the scheme had demanded passion. what was the matter with him? he was stirred that lady harman should send for him, and his inability to deal with her perplexities deepened his realization of the ignorance and superficiality he had so long masked even from himself beneath the tricks and pretensions of a gay scepticism. he went away fully resolved to grapple with the entire hostel question, and he put the patched and tortured manuscript of the new novel aside with a certain satisfaction to do this.
the more he reflected upon the nature of this study he proposed for himself the more it attracted him. it was some such reality as this he had been wanting. he could presently doubt whether he would ever go back to his novel-writing again, or at least to the sort of novel-writing he had been doing hitherto. to invent stories to save middle-aged prosperous middle-class people from the distresses of thinking, is surely no work for a self-respecting man. stevenson in the very deeps of that dishonourable traffic had realized as much and likened himself to a fille de joie, and haggard, of the same school and period, had abandoned blood and thunder at the climax of his success for the honest study of agricultural conditions. the newer successes were turning out work, less and less conventional and agreeable and more and more stiffened with facts and sincerities.... he would show lady harman that a certain debonair quality he had always affected, wasn't incompatible with a powerful grasp of general conditions.... and she wanted this done. suppose he did it in a way that made him necessary to her. suppose he did it very well.
he set to work, and understanding as you do a certain quality of the chameleon in mr. brumley's moral nature, you will understand that he worked through a considerable variety of moods. sometimes he worked with disinterested passion and sometimes he was greatly sustained by this thought that here was something that would weave him in with the gravities of her life and give him perhaps a new inlet to intimacy. and presently a third thing came to his help, and that was the discovery that the questions arising out of this attempt to realize the importance of those hostels, were in themselves very fascinating questions for an intelligent person.
because before you have done with the business of the modern employé, you must, if you are an intelligent person, have taken a view of the whole vast process of social reorganization that began with the development of factory labour and big towns, and which is even now scarcely advanced enough for us to see its general trend. for a time mr. brumley did not realize the magnitude of the thing he was looking at; when he did, theories sprouted in his mind like mushrooms and he babbled with mental excitement. he came in a state of the utmost lucidity to explain his theories to lady harman, and they struck that lady at the time as being the most illuminating suggestions she had ever encountered. they threw an appearance of order, of process, over a world of trade and employment and competition that had hitherto seemed too complex and mysterious for any understanding.
"you see," said mr. brumley—they had met that day in kensington gardens and they were sitting side by side upon green chairs near the frozen writings of physical energy—"you see, if i may lecture a little, putting the thing as simply as possible, the world has been filling up new spaces ever since the discovery of america; all the period from then to about 1870, let us say, was a period of rapid increase of population in response to new opportunities of living and new fulnesses of life in every direction. during that time, four hundred years of it roughly, there was a huge development of family life; to marry and rear a quite considerable family became the chief business of everybody, celibacy grew rare, monasteries and nunneries which had abounded vanished like things dissolving in a flood and even the priests became protestant against celibacy and took unto themselves wives and had huge families. the natural checks upon increase, famine and pestilence, were lifted by more systematized communication and by scientific discovery; and altogether and as a consequence the world now has probably three or four times the human population it ever carried before. everywhere in that period the family prevailed again, the prospering multiplying household; it was a return to the family, to the reproductive social grouping of early barbaric life, and naturally all the thought of the modern world which has emerged since the fifteenth century falls into this form. so i see it, lady harman. the generation of our grandfathers in the opening nineteenth century had two shaping ideas, two forms of thought, the family and progress, not realizing that that very progress which had suddenly reopened the doors of opportunity for the family that had revived the ancient injunction to increase and multiply and replenish the earth, might presently close that door again and declare the world was filled. but that is what is happening now. the doors close. that immense swarming and multiplying of little people is over, and the forces of social organization have been coming into play now, more and more for a century and a half, to produce new wholesale ways of doing things, new great organizations, organizations that invade the autonomous family more and more, and are perhaps destined ultimately to destroy it altogether and supersede it. at least it is so i make my reading of history in these matters."
"yes," said lady harman, with knitted brows, "yes," and wondered privately whether it would be possible to get from that opening to the matter of her hostels before it was time for her to return for sir isaac's tea.
mr. brumley continued to talk with his eyes fixed as it were upon his thoughts. "these things, lady harman, go on at different paces in different regions. i will not trouble you with a discussion of that, or of emigration, of any of the details of the vast proliferation that preceded the present phase. suffice it, that now all the tendency is back towards restraints upon increase, to an increasing celibacy, to a fall in the birth-rate and in the average size of families, to—to a release of women from an entire devotion to a numerous offspring, and so at last to the supersession of those little family units that for four centuries have made up the substance of social life and determined nearly all our moral and sentimental attitudes. the autonomy of the family is being steadily destroyed, and it is being replaced by the autonomy of the individual in relation to some syndicated economic effort."
"i think," said lady harman slowly, arresting him by a gesture, "if you could make that about autonomy a little clearer...."
mr. brumley did. he went on to point out with the lucidity of a university extension lecturer what he meant by these singular phrases. she listened intelligently but with effort. he was much too intent upon getting the thing expressed to his own satisfaction to notice any absurdity in his preoccupation with these theories about the population of the world in the face of her immediate practical difficulties. he declared that the onset of this new phase in human life, the modern phase, wherein there was apparently to be no more "proliferating," but instead a settling down of population towards a stable equilibrium, became apparent first with the expropriation of the english peasantry and the birth of the factory system and machine production. "since that time one can trace a steady substitution of wholesale and collective methods for household and family methods. it has gone far with us now. instead of the woman drawing water from a well, the pipes and taps of the water company. instead of the home-made rushlight, the electric lamp. instead of home-spun, ready-made clothes. instead of home-brewed, the brewer's cask. instead of home-baked, first the little baker and then, clean and punctual, the international bread and cake stores. instead of the child learning at its mother's knee, the compulsory elementary school. flats take the place of separate houses. instead of the little holding, the big farm, and instead of the children working at home, the factory. everywhere synthesis. everywhere the little independent proprietor gives place to the company and the company to the trust. you follow all this, lady harman?"
"go on," she said, encouraged by that transitory glimpse of the stores in his discourse.
"now london—and england generally—had its period of expansion and got on to the beginnings at least of this period of synthesis that is following it, sooner than any other country in the world; and because it was the first to reach the new stage it developed the characteristics of the new stage with a stronger flavour of the old than did such later growths of civilization as new york or bombay or berlin. that is why london and our british big cities generally are congestions of little houses, little homes, while the newer great cities run to apartments and flats. we hadn't grasped the logical consequences of what we were in for so completely as the people abroad did who caught it later, and that is why, as we began to develop our new floating population of mainly celibate employees and childless people, they had mostly to go into lodgings, they went into the homes that were intended for families as accessories to the family, and they were able to go in because the families were no longer so numerous as they used to be. london is still largely a city of landladies and lodgings, and in no other part of the world is there so big a population of lodgers. and this business of your hostels is nothing more nor less than the beginning of the end of that. just as the great refreshment caterers have mopped up the ancient multitude of coffee-houses and squalid little special feeding arrangements of the days of tittlebat titmouse and dick swiveller, so now your hostels are going to mop up the lodging-house system of london. of course there are other and kindred movements. naturally. the y.w.c.a., the y.m.c.a., the london girls club union and so forth are all doing kindred work."
"but what, mr. brumley, what is to become of the landladies?" asked lady harman.
mr. brumley was checked in mid theory.
"i hadn't thought of the landladies," he said, after a short pause.
"they worry me," said lady harman.
"um," said mr. brumley, thrown out.
"do you know the other day i went into chelsea, where there are whole streets of lodgings, and—i suppose it was wrong of me, but i went and pretended to be looking for rooms for a girl clerk i knew, and i saw—oh! no end of rooms. and such poor old women, such dingy, worked-out, broken old women, with a kind of fearful sharpness, so eager, so dreadfully eager to get that girl clerk who didn't exist...."
she looked at him with an expression of pained enquiry.
"that," said mr. brumley, "that i think is a question, so to speak, for the social ambulance. if perhaps i might go on——that particular difficulty we might consider later. i think i was talking of the general synthesis."
"yes," said lady harman. "and what is it exactly that is to take the place of these isolated little homes and these dreary little lodgings? here are we, my husband and i, rushing in with this new thing, just as he rushed in with his stores thirty years ago and overset little bakers and confectioners and refreshment dealers by the hundred. some of them—poor dears—they——i don't like to think. and it wasn't a good thing he made after all,—only a hard sort of thing. he made all those shops of his—with the girls who strike and say they are sweated and driven.... and now here we are making a kind of barrack place for people to live in!"
she expressed the rest of her ideas with a gesture of the hands.
"i admit the process has its dangers," said mr. brumley. "it's like the supersession of the small holdings by the latifundia in italy. but that's just where our great opportunity comes in. these synthetic phases have occurred before in the world's history and their history is a history of lost opportunities.... but need ours be?"
she had a feeling as though something had slipped through her fingers.
"i feel," she said, "that it is more important to me than anything else in life, that these hostels, anyhow, which are springing so rapidly from a chance suggestion of mine, shouldn't be lost opportunities."
"exactly," said mr. brumley, with the gesture of one who recovers a thread. "that is just what i am driving at."
the fingers of his extended hand felt in the warm afternoon air for a moment, and then he said "ah!" in a tone of recovery while she waited respectfully for the resumed thread.
"you see," he said, "i regard this process of synthesis, this substitution of wholesale and collective methods for homely and individual ones as, under existing conditions, inevitable—inevitable. it's the phase we live in, it's to this we have to adapt ourselves. it is as little under your control or mine as the movement of the sun through the zodiac. practically, that is. and what we have to do is not, i think, to sigh for lost homes and the age of gold and spade husbandry, and pigs and hens in the home, and so on, but to make this new synthetic life tolerable for the mass of men and women, hopeful for the mass of men and women, a thing developing and ascending. that's where your hostels come in, lady harman; that's where they're so important. they're a pioneer movement. if they succeed—and things in sir isaac's hands have a way of succeeding at any rate to the paying point—then there'll be a headlong rush of imitations, imitating your good features, imitating your bad features, deepening a groove.... you see my point?"
"yes," she said. "it makes me—more afraid than ever."
"but hopeful," said mr. brumley, presuming to lay his hand for an instant on her arm. "it's big enough to be inspiring."
"but i'm afraid," she said.
"it's laying down the lines of a new social life—no less. and what makes it so strange, so typical, too, of the way social forces work nowadays, is that your husband, who has all the instinctive insistence upon every right and restriction of the family relation in his private life, who is narrowly, passionately for the home in his own case, who hates all books and discussion that seem to touch it, should in his business activities be striking this tremendous new blow at the ancient organization. for that, you see, is what it amounts to."
"yes," said lady harman slowly. "yes. of course, he doesn't know...."
mr. brumley was silent for a little while. "you see," he resumed, "at the worst this new social life may become a sort of slavery in barracks; at the best—it might become something very wonderful. my mind's been busy now for days thinking just how wonderful the new life might be. instead of the old bickering, crowded family home, a new home of comrades...."
he made another pause, and his thoughts ran off upon a fresh track.
"in looking up all these things i came upon a queer little literature of pamphlets and so forth, dealing with the case of the shop assistants. they have a great grievance in what they call the living-in system. the employers herd them in dormitories over the shops, and usually feed them by gaslight in the basements; they fine them and keep an almost intolerable grip upon them; make them go to bed at half-past ten, make them go to church on sundays,—all sorts of petty tyrannies. the assistants are passionately against this, but they've got no power to strike. where could they go if they struck? into the street. only people who live out and have homes of their own to sulk in can strike. naturally, therefore, as a preliminary to any other improvement in the shop assistant's life, these young people want to live out. practically that's an impossible demand at present, because they couldn't get lodgings and live out with any decency at all on what it costs their employers to lodge and feed them in. well, here you see a curious possibility for your hostels. you open the prospect of a living-out system for shop assistants. but just in the degree in which you choose to interfere with them, regulate them, bully and deal with them wholesale through their employers, do you make the new living-out method approximate to the living-in. that's a curious side development, isn't it?"
lady harman appreciated that.
"that's only the beginning of the business. there's something more these hostels might touch...."
mr. brumley gathered himself together for the new aspect. "there's marriage," he said.
"one of the most interesting and unsatisfactory aspects of the life of the employee to-day—and you know the employee is now in the majority in the adult population—is this. you see, we hold them celibate. we hold them celibate for a longer and longer period; the average age at marriage rises steadily; and so long as they remain celibate we are prepared with some sort of ideas about the future development of their social life, clubs, hostels, living-in, and so forth. but at present we haven't any ideas at all about the adaptation of the natural pairing instinct to the new state of affairs. ultimately the employee marries; they hold out as long as they possibly can, but ultimately they have to. they have to, even in the face of an economic system that holds out no prospects of anything but insecurity and an increasing chance of trouble and disaster to the employee's family group. what happens is that they drop back into a distressful, crippled, insecure imitation of the old family life as one had it in what i might call the multiplying periods of history. they start a home,—they dream of a cottage, but they drift to a lodging, and usually it isn't the best sort of lodging, for landladies hate wives and the other lodgers detest babies. often the young couple doesn't have babies. you see, they are more intelligent than peasants, and intelligence and fecundity vary reciprocally," said mr. brumley.
"you mean?" interrupted lady harman softly.
"there is a world-wide fall in the birth-rate. people don't have the families they did."
"yes," said lady harman. "i understand now."
"and the more prosperous or the more sanguine take these suburban little houses, these hutches that make such places as hendon nightmares of monotony, or go into ridiculous jerry-built sham cottages in some garden suburb, where each young wife does her own housework and pretends to like it. they have a sort of happiness for a time, i suppose; the woman stops all outside work, the man, very much handicapped, goes on competing against single men. then—nothing more happens. except difficulties. the world goes dull and grey for them. they look about for a lodger, perhaps. have you read gissing's paying guest?..."
"i suppose," said lady harman, "i suppose it is like that. one tries not to think it is so."
"one needn't let oneself believe that dullness is unhappiness," said mr. brumley. "i don't want to paint things sadder than they are. but it's not a fine life, it's not a full life, that life in a neo-malthusian suburban hutch."
"neo——?" asked lady harman.
"a mere phrase," said mr. brumley hastily. "the extraordinary thing is that, until you set me looking into these things with your questions, i've always taken this sort of thing for granted, as though it couldn't be otherwise. now i seem to see with a kind of freshness. i'm astounded at the muddle of it, the waste and aimlessness of it. and here again it is, lady harman, that i think your opportunity comes in. with these hostels as they might be projected now, you seem to have the possibility of a modernized, more collective and civilized family life than the old close congestion of the single home, and i see no reason at all why you shouldn't carry that collective life on to the married stage. as things are now these little communities don't go beyond the pairing—and out they drift to find the homestead they will never possess. what has been borne in upon me more and more forcibly as i have gone through your—your nest of problems, is the idea that the new social—association, that has so extensively replaced the old family group, might be carried on right through life, that it might work in with all sorts of other discontents and bad adjustments.... the life of the women in these little childless or one-or-two-child homes is more unsatisfactory even than the man's."
mr. brumley's face flushed with enthusiasm and he wagged a finger to emphasize his words. "why not make hostels, lady harman, for married couples? why not try that experiment so many people have talked about of the conjoint kitchen and refectory, the conjoint nursery, the collective social life, so that the children who are single children or at best children in small families of two or three, may have the advantages of playfellows, and the young mothers still, if they choose, continue to have a social existence and go on with their professional or business, work? that's the next step your hostels might take ... incidentally you see this opens a way to a life of relative freedom for the woman who is married.... i don't know if you have read mrs. stetson. yes, charlotte perkins gilman stetson.... yes, woman and economics, that's the book.
"i know," mr. brumley went on, "i seem to be opening out your project like a concertina, but i want you to see just how my thoughts have been going about all this. i want you to realize i haven't been idle during these last few weeks. i know it's a far cry from what the hostels are to all these ideas of what they might begin to be, i know the difficulties in your way—all sorts of difficulties. but when i think just how you stand at the very centre of the moulding forces in these changes...."
he dropped into an eloquent silence.
lady harman looked thoughtfully at the sunlight under the trees.
"you think," she said, "that it comes to as much as all this."
"more," said mr. brumley.
"i was frightened before. now——you make me feel as though someone had put the wheel of a motor car in my hand, started it and told me to steer...."
