She had made a list on a sheet of paper, and she told him. She began with the little home at the seaside—she knew he couldn't object to that. The only thing he had to do was to promise to keep the places of the girls who were there open for them. She would pay for it—it would be a real pleasure to her—and she would undertake the whole responsibility.
She watched him anxiously while she spoke, but he was not looking at her. He was looking at the fire.
In the next place, the girls oughtn't to stand so much. Let him ask a doctor, or even the managers—anyone who understood the work and its effect on women—it really was harmful to them, and they ought also to wear proper shoes.
His face changed a little. It would be perfectly easy to make them wear regulation shoes.
The next point was the dinner—and the room where they could sit comfortably. She seemed to see, suddenly, that it was no use mentioning the lifts. That was all, she said.
James sat forward and looked at her. She saw at once that he was not laughing or feeling unduly affectionate. In fact his voice sounded a little sharp.
"My dear little girl," he laid it down, "we can't make a house have a room that it hasn't got, can we?"
Mary looked back at him courageously. "I thought that perhaps you could take a room outside, or perhaps partition off part of one of the tea-rooms. Some of them are very large."
James chose to answer the last part of this remark.
"And that's why the customers come to them, my dear," he told her more urbanely, but not, she suspected, in a really pleasant spirit. "People hate small, hot, stuffy rooms. Imagine yourself passing by the door of two shops and looking in—wouldn't you choose the one that seemed wide and airy and high rather than the one that was poky?"