walks, just when the
stream of workers is going home; he battled his way with her along the
footpath of Charing Cross Railway Bridge from the Waterloo side, they
swam in the mild evening sunshine of September against a trampling
torrent of bobbing heads, and afterwards they had tea together in one of
the International Stores near the Strand, where Mr. Brumley made an
unsuccessful attempt to draw out the waitress on the subject of Babs
Wheeler and the recent strike. The young woman might have talked freely
to a man alone or freely to Lady Harman alone but the combination of the
two made her shy. The bridge experience led to several other
expeditions, to see home-going on the tube, at the big railway termini,
on the train--and once they followed up the process to Streatham and saw
how the people pour out of the train at last and scatter--until at last
they are just isolated individuals running up steps, diving into
basements. And then it occurred to Mr. Brumley that he knew someone who
would take them over "Gerrard," that huge telephone exchange, and there
Lady Harman saw how the National Telephone Company, as it was in those
days, had a care for its staff, the pleasant club rooms, the rest room,
and stood in that queer rendez-vous of messages, where the "Hello" girl
sits all day, wearing a strange metallic apparatus over ear and mouth,
watching small lights that wink significantly at her and perpetually
pulling out and slipping in and releasing little flexible strings that
seem to have a resilient volition of their own. They hunted out Mrs.
Barnet and heard her ideas about conjoint homes for spinsters in the
Garden Suburb. And then they went over a Training College for elementary
teachers and visited the Post Office and then came back to more
unobtrusive contemplation, from the customer's little table, of the
ministering personalities of the International Stores.

There were times when all these things seen, seemed to fall into an
entirely explicable system under Mr. Brumley's exposition, when they
seemed to be giving and most generously giving the clearest indications
of what kind of thing the Hostels had to be, and times when this all
vanished again and her mind became confused and perplexed. She tried to
express just what it was she missed to Mr. Brumley. "One doesn't," she
said, "see all of them and what one sees isn't what we have to do with.
I mean we see them dressed up and respectable and busy and then they go
h