Their number is so great now that the most old-fashioned and conservative of us are bound to recognise women workers as a separate factor in our national life.

There has been a gradual, though very evident, upheaval in our social system during the last few years; new occupations are opening to women on every side, and girls flock to London and other large centres to fit themselves for these. They are the women of the future, keen, eager for the fray, with fresh interests, hopes and ambitions—a motley crowd gathered from every section of middle-class society.

It is both a happiness and an education to come into close personal touch with fresh young lives whose work will so greatly affect the well-being of England in the near future. For in each life there lie elements of the eternal and the divine, capacities for good or evil. It is a time for building. Character, tastes, habits, faith, may either be unformed or in a transition state. When the floods rise and storm winds blow, strong foundations laid at the outset of a girl’s independent career will help her to resist and stand firm.

We are a large community of women at Kent House, most of us young and untried, though among the older ones we are glad to number a few lecturers, teachers, and writers, besides nurses from one or other of the great nursing associations of London. Friends in need these last, especially in the winter-time, when chills and other small ailments attack our ranks like foes to be fought and conquered.

“Such a lot of women living together, and so little bickering and snarling!” a visitor exclaimed the other day. But I think most of us are too busy to be cantankerous, and our common womanhood, lived out in homelike surroundings, links us too closely together for petty word-wars.

Happy, well-filled student life forms the principal element of the household, though I was amused one day to find that even students may be unlearned in the etymology of words. One of our candidates for admission emulated the immortal M. Jourdain, who talked prose without knowing it, by remarking doubtfully, “I am not a student. I only go to Bedford College for classes.”

Most of the girls sleep in cubicles separated by thin wood partitions, the rooms being reserved for the older ladies, except two or three double rooms apportioned to girls who chum together.

Conversation is carried on freely “over the cubicle wall,” and listeners may sometimes overhear scraps illustrating the good comradeship and bonhomie of student life.

“Oh, Molly,” cries one girl to her mate next door, “when you leave the Slade and set up a studio, and Harold and I are earning enough to marry on, won’t we have many a jaw about jolly old Kent House left behind!”

Kent House prices are framed to meet slender resources. For twelve shillings weekly a girl can provide herself with a snug little cubicle and good breakfast and supper. The dining-hall menu is of a varied order, always tea, coffee, and cocoa without stint, a roast joint, and two or three made dishes, fish or soup, bread and butter, and jam or marmalade.

Dinner and afternoon tea are not included in the fixed board tariff, but paid for at table, restaurant fashion—uniform charge 9d. and 4d., respectively.

Anyone who orders “five o’clock tea” is served with a pot freshly made for each person, bread and butter, muffins, or tea-cake. We are glad to welcome non-residents to both these meals.

“But how can you make the concern pay at such prices?” asks some cynical political economist.

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.