proval in that insubordinate young woman's eye.
Miss Wheeler was a minute swaggering person, much akimbo, with a little
round blue-eyed innocent face that shone with delight at the lark of
living. Her three companions who were in the lobby with her to receive
and usher in Lady Harman seemed just as young, but they were relatively
unilluminated except by their manifest devotion to their leader. They
displayed rather than concealed their opinion of her as a "dear" and a
"fair wonder." And the meeting generally it seemed to her was a
gathering of very human young women, rather restless, then agog to see
her and her clothes, and then somehow allayed by her appearance and
quite amiably attentive to what she had to say. A majority were young
girls dressed with the cheap smartness of the suburbs, the rest were for
the most part older and dingier, and here and there were dotted young
ladies of a remarkable and questionable smartness. In the front row,
full of shy recognitions and a little disguised by an unfamiliar hat was
Susan's sister Alice.

As Lady Harman had made up her mind that she was not going to deliver a
speech she felt no diffidence in speaking. She was far too intent on her
message to be embarrassed by any thought of the effect she was
producing. She talked as she might have talked in one of her easier
moods to Mr. Brumley. And as she talked it happened that Miss Babs
Wheeler and quite a number of the other girls present watched her face
and fell in love with her.

She began with her habitual prelude. "You see," she said, and stopped
and began again. She wanted to tell them and with a clumsy simplicity
she told them how these Hostels had arisen out of her desire that they
should have something better than the uncomfortable lodgings in which
they lived. They weren't a business enterprise, but they weren't any
sort of charity. "And I wanted them to be the sort of place in which you
would feel quite free. I hadn't any sort of intention of having you
interfered with. I hate being interfered with myself, and I understand
just as well as anyone can that you don't like it either. I wanted these
Hostels to be the sort of place that you might perhaps after a time
almost manage and run for yourselves. You might have a committee or
something.... Only you know it isn't always easy to do as one wants.
Things don't always go in this world as one wants them to
go--particularly if one isn't clever." She lost herself for a moment