ll 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