ial in themselves, but of
the gravest moment for the welfare of the hostels. There was a phrase
about "noisy or improper conduct" in the revised rules. Few people would
suspect a corridor, ten feet wide and two hundred feet long, as a
temptation to impropriety, but Mrs. Pembrose found it was so. The effect
of the corridors upon undisciplined girls quite unaccustomed to
corridors was for a time most undesirable. For example they were moved
to _run_ along them violently. They ran races along them, when they
overtook they jostled, when they were overtaken they squealed. The
average velocity in the corridors of the lady occupants of the
Bloomsbury Hostel during the first fortnight of its existence was seven
miles an hour. Was that violence? Was that impropriety? The building was
all steel construction, but one _heard_ even in the Head Matron's room.
And then there was the effect of the rows and rows of windows opening
out upon the square. The square had some pleasant old trees and it was
attractive to look down into their upper branches, where the sparrows
mobbed and chattered perpetually, and over them at the chimneys and
turrets and sky signs of the London world. The girls looked. So far they
were certainly within their rights. But they did not look modestly, they
did not look discreetly. They looked out of wide-open windows, they even
sat perilously and protrudingly on the window sills conversing across
the facade from window to window, attracting attention, and once to Mrs.
Pembrose's certain knowledge a man in the street joined in. It was on a
Sunday morning, too, a Bloomsbury Sunday morning!

But graver things were to rouse the preventive prohibitionist in the
soul of Mrs. Pembrose. There was the visiting of one another's rooms and
cubicles. Most of these young people had never possessed or dreamt of
possessing a pretty and presentable apartment to themselves, and the
first effect of this was to produce a decorative outbreak, a vigorous
framing of photographs and hammering of nails ("dust-gathering
litter."--_Mrs. Pembrose_) and then--visiting. They visited at all hours
and in all costumes; they sat in groups of three or four, one on the
chair and the rest on the bed conversing into late hours,--entirely
uncensored conversations too often accompanied by laughter. When Mrs.
Pembrose took this to Lady Harman she found her extraordinarily blind to
the conceivable evils of this free intercourse. "But Lady Harman!" said
Mr