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