This is going to be the testing fight. I am learning great new lessons every day. I only wish I could pass them on. A woman came up to me in the street the other day and said: "Please, I’ve tried to do what you said wi’ them substitoots (oh, the scorn in her voice!). But ’Arry, ’e won’t look at ’em. Calls ’em messes, ’e does; wants ’is ’onest beefsteak, ’e does, an’ I don’t blime ’im, either." Neither do I, nevertheless it will be my mournful duty to try and impress on him and all the other Harrys who are making the lives of their helpmeets a burden over this food conservation business, that the true patriot is the man who eats his imitation steak with a smile, assuring the woman who has laboured over its preparation that it is quite equal to the real thing. Nobody would be deceived, but life would be easier. I never before realised that bread is really the staple food of our working folks. It is rather humiliating to discover how scanty are the reserves we are now able to call up. When you speak to the average cottage woman about soup and explain how nourishing it is for the children and how cheaply it can be prepared out of bones, if only the necessary care is bestowed on it, she has a way of putting her hands on her hips and looking you very haughtily in the face with the air of a person receiving a personal insult. "Feed me chillen on bones! Good Lord! ’as it come to that? Not me, thank you, ma’am. I’ll get me bit o’ meat and bread and butter as long as I can get ’em and wen they ain’t to be got, will do without." How are you to combat that sort of argument which is everywhere, like sorrow—"not in single spies, but in battalions"! I shall have to think hard. These people have got to be educated. The whole process of teaching them the alphabet has to be entered on now, when we are in the thick of the testing fight. Oh, it is so very, very English, so tremendously, unutterably stupid, and maddening! I shall have to stop off or I shall be writing down things that the admirable George, with his exclusive command of strong language, will not permit you to read. As usual, when one arrives at the end of one’s tether, something happens, and there, right in front at the end of what looked like a blind alley, stood the open door. The Administration, having fully tested the value of the Communal Kitchen, has sent out advices to the country to establish them wherever possible. As Chairman of our Kitchen Committee, I went to London with another member—a delightful, practical, breezy person, to inspect the working of the big experimental Kitchen on Westminster Bridge Road. It was thoroughly interesting and for the first time hope of solutions of many problems dawned on our weary spirits. We returned home to report and got authority to act. I will explain the Communal Kitchen to you, though it is incredible to imagine your great, rich and inexhaustible country ever coming even within long-distance range of such a contingency.