“They worry me,” said Lady Harman.
“Um,” said Mr. Brumley, thrown out.
“Do you know the other day I went into Chelsea, where there are whole streets of lodgings, and—I suppose it was wrong of me, but I went and pretended to be looking for rooms for a girl clerk I knew, and I saw—Oh! no end of rooms. And such poor old women, such dingy, worked-out, broken old women, with a kind of fearful sharpness, so eager, so dreadfully eager to get that girl clerk who didn’t exist....”
She looked at him with an expression of pained enquiry.
“That,” said Mr. Brumley, “that I think is a question, so to speak, for the social ambulance. If perhaps I might go on——That particular difficulty we might consider later. I think I was talking of the general synthesis.”
“Yes,” said Lady Harman. “And what is it exactly that is to take the place of these isolated little homes and these dreary little lodgings? Here are we, my husband and I, rushing in with this new thing, just as he rushed in with his stores thirty years ago and overset little bakers and confectioners and refreshment dealers by the hundred. Some of them—poor dears—they——I don’t like to think. And it wasn’t a good thing he made after all,—only a hard sort of thing. He made all those shops of his—with the girls who strike and say they are sweated and driven.... And now here we are making a kind of barrack place for people to live in!”
She expressed the rest of her ideas with a gesture of the hands.
“I admit the process has its dangers,” said Mr. Brumley. “It’s like the supersession of the small holdings by the latifundia in Italy. But that’s just where our great opportunity comes in. These synthetic phases have occurred before in the world’s history and their history is a history of lost opportunities.... But need ours be?”
She had a feeling as though something had slipped through her fingers.
“I feel,” she said, “that it is more important to me than anything else in life, that these Hostels, anyhow, which are springing so rapidly from a chance suggestion of mine, shouldn’t be lost opportunities.”