evening of all the discipline and
regulations they have to put up with during the day."

"Have to put up with!" murmured Sir Isaac.

"I wish that had been thought of sooner. If we had made the places look
a little more ordinary and called them Osborne House or something a
little old-fashioned like that, something with a touch of the Old Queen
about it and all that kind of thing."

"We can't go to the expense of taking down all those big gilt letters
just to please the fancies of Miss Babs Wheeler."

"It's too late now to do that, perhaps. But we could do something, I
think, to remove the suspicions ... I want, Isaac----I think----" She
pulled herself together to announce her determination. "I think if I
were to go to the girls and meet a delegation of them, and just talk to
them plainly about what we mean by this hostel."

"_You_ can't go making speeches."

"It would just be talking to them."

"It's such a Come Down," said Sir Isaac, after a momentary contemplation
of the possibility.

For some time they talked without getting very far from these positions
they had assumed. At last Sir Isaac shifted back upon his expert. "Can't
we talk about it to Mrs. Pembrose? She knows more about this sort of
business than we do."

"I'm not going to talk to Mrs. Pembrose," said Lady Harman, after a
little interval. Some unusual quality in her quiet voice made Sir Isaac
lift his eyes to her face for a moment.

So one Saturday afternoon, Lady Harman had a meeting with a roomful of
recalcitrant girls at the Regent Street Refreshment Branch, which looked
very odd to her with grey cotton wrappers over everything and its blinds
down, and for the first time she came face to face with the people for
whom almost in spite of herself she was working. It was a meeting
summoned by the International Branch of the National Union of Waitresses
and Miss Babs Wheeler and Mr. Graper were so to speak the north and
south poles of the little group upon the improvised platform from which
Lady Harman was to talk to the gathering. She would have liked the
support of Mr. Brumley, but she couldn't contrive any unostentatious way
of bringing him into the business without putting it upon a footing that
would have involved the appearance of Sir Isaac and Mrs. Pembrose
and--everybody. And essentially it wasn't to be everybody. It was to be
a little talk.

Lady Harman rather liked the appearance of Miss Babs Wheeler, and met
more than an answering ap