“Yes,” she said, “I’m rather specially up in this sort of question. I worked side by side with my poor Frederick all his life, we were collaborators, and this question of the urban distributive employee was one of his special studies. Yes, he would have been tremendously interested in Sir Isaac’s project.”
“You know what we are doing?”
“Every one is interested in Sir Isaac’s enterprise. Naturally. Yes, I think I have a fairly good idea of what you mean to do. It’s a great experiment.”
“You think it is likely to answer?” said Mr. Brumley.
“In Sir Isaac’s hands it is very likely to answer,” said Mrs. Pembrose with her eye steadily on Lady Harman.
There was a little pause. “Yes, now you wrote of difficulties and drawing upon my experience. Of course just now I’m quite at Sir Isaac’s disposal.”
Lady Harman found herself thrust perforce into the rôle of her husband’s spokeswoman. She asked Mrs. Pembrose if she knew the exact nature of the experiment they contemplated.
Mrs. Pembrose hadn’t a doubt she knew. Of course for a long time and more especially in the Metropolis where the distances were so great and increasing so rapidly, there had been a gathering feeling not only in the catering trade, but in very many factory industries, against the daily journey to employment and home again. It was irksome and wasteful to everyone concerned, there was a great loss in control, later hours of beginning, uncertain service. “Yes, my husband calculated the hours lost in London every week, hours that are neither work nor play, mere tiresome stuffy journeying. It made an enormous sum. It worked out at hundreds of working lives per week.” Sir Isaac’s project was to abolish all that, to bring his staff into line with the drapers and grocers who kept their assistants on the living-in system....
“I thought people objected to the living-in system,” said Mr. Brumley.
“There’s an agitation against it on the part of a small Trade Union of Shop Assistants,” said Mrs. Pembrose. “But they have no real alternative to propose.”