I answer, illogically of course, as I am a woman, “We do make it pay.”
Conversation at meals is by no means confined to the English tongue, for visitors of all nationalities throw themselves on the hospitality of Kent House. English “as she is spoke” by French and Germans makes many a quaint piece of word-painting.
A Dutch lady, describing her struggles with the letter “h,” raised a merry laugh at one of the supper-tables.
“I go to the Wood Saint John,” she remarked, “and I say to the gend’arme, ‘Which bus, if you please, sare, take I?’ He say to me quite short ‘Hatless’; but I find it not. Then I ask one other. He say to me, ‘You would mean Atlas—no?’ But I say, ‘No, I do not think—it is Hatless.’ He smile and he tell me, ‘The English peoples they goes without umbrellas, but without hats—oh, no, nevare!’”
It has been a work of great difficulty to establish and keep going a Home in the very centre of London on liberal housekeeping lines which yet should be self-supporting. Perhaps it has been even more difficult to keep in close personal relationship with girls and women who need society, friends, sympathy, amusement, yet whose freedom must in no sense be interfered with.
Without a sursum corda I believe both would be impossible. With it we have surmounted many difficulties and lived through many dark days. And as morning after morning we gather together as a household to give the first freshness of our thoughts to God, there may be many denominations amongst us, but there is one Christ, and there is a sacred unity underlying every variety of dogma or ritual—the unity of His spirit in His bond of peace.