“Mr. Clarke,” I said, “may I ask you a question: What preparation have these new employés had for business?”

And it turns out, as a matter of fact, most of them haven’t had any. A large number of this quarter of a million women who came at the call of the London Board of Trade to take the places of men in the offices, are of the class who since they were “finished” at school, have been living quiet English lives in pleasant suburbs where the rose trees grow and everybody strives to be truly a lady who doesn’t descend to working for money. It is difficult for an American woman of any class to visualise such an ideal. But it was a British fact. There were thousands of correct English girls like this, whose pulses had never thrilled to a career who are finding it now suddenly thrust upon them.

“Mr. Clarke,” I said, “suppose a quarter of a million men were to be hastily turned loose in a kitchen or nursery to do the work to which women have been born and trained for generations. Perhaps they might not be able to handle the job with just the precision of their predecessors. Now do you think they would?”

Mr. Clarke raised his commercial hand in a quick gesture of protest: “Dear lady,” he said, “I remember when my wife once tried me out one day in the nursery—one day was enough for her and for me—I, well, I wasn’t equal to the strain. Frankly, I’m quite sure most men wouldn’t have the staying power for the tasks you mention.”

So you see, in comparison, perhaps the new women on the high stools that have been specially made to their size, are doing pretty well anyhow. There are 73,000 more of them in government offices, the lower clerkships in the civil service having been opened to them since the war. And no less than 42,000 more women have replaced men in finance and banking.

Really, it was like taking the last trench in the Great Push when the women’s battalions arrived at Lombard and Threadneedle streets. That bulwark of the conservatism of the ages, the Bank of England, even, capitulates. And the woman movement has swept directly past the resplendent functionary in the red coat and bright brass buttons who walks up and down before its outer portals like something the receding centuries forgot and left behind on the scene. He still has the habit of challenging so much as a woman visitor. It is a hold-over perhaps from the strenuous days of that other woman movement when every government institution had to be barricaded against the suffragettes, and your hand bag was always searched to see if you carried a bomb. But the bright red gentleman is more likely to let you by now than before 1914.

Inside, as you penetrate the innermost recesses, you will go past glass partitioned doors through which are to be seen girls’ heads bending over the high desks. And you will meet girl clerks with ledgers under their arms hurrying across court yards and in and out and up and down all curious, winding, musty passage ways. I know of nowhere in the world that you feel the solemn significance of the new woman movement more than here as you catch the echo of these new footsteps on stone floors where for hundreds of years no woman’s foot has ever trod before.

The Bank of England isn’t giving out the figures about the number of its women employés. An official just looks the other way and directs you down the corridor to put the inquiry to another black frock coat. O, well, if that’s the way they feel about it! Others with less ivy on the walls may speak. The London and Southwestern Bank which before the war employed but two women, and these stenographers, now has 900 women. One of London’s greatest banks, the London, City and Midland, has among 3000 employés 2600 women. The new woman in commerce is emerging in England and these are some of the verdicts on her efficiency:

Bank of England: “We find the women quick at writing, slow at figures. We have been surprised to find that they do as well as they do. But they are not so efficient as men.”

London, City and Midland Bank: “For accuracy, willingness, and attention to duty, we may say that women employés excel.”