Miss Beale’s misgivings about the East End work were probably never quite set at rest. Writing to Mrs. Charles Robinson in 1899, she said: ‘I shall perhaps sleep two nights at St. Hilda’s East. I feel the whole question of Settlements most difficult. It was undertaken against my judgment, and yet the guidance all the way seems to point to its being right. Sisters and Deaconesses are much better for this work, yet there are some whom we can enlist who will never join and could not join “Orders.”’ The Guild members who had been trained by their head not always acquiescingly to ‘do the next thing,’ but to think out questions, to plan carefully for the best if hardest, belonged to a new generation and had received another call. They saw how greatly educated women were needed to deal with charity organisation, with labour problems, with the children of the poor in schools and workhouses. Many of them were already at work for these. They felt, too, that they should take their part in helping to rouse others to study and work for the poor. On the other hand, they saw the need for cheap, good girls’ education to be one which was lessening every year. They had never felt it themselves, had had no struggle for training under pressure of adverse circumstances. Finally, they must have known that it was work which Miss Beale would not fail to carry on, meeting every necessity which was brought to her personal notice. On May 6, 1889, a general meeting of the Guild was held in London to consider further the lines on which the adopted scheme should be carried out. It was decided that the Guild Settlement should be made in London, in the parish of St. John’s, Bethnal Green, described by its vicar, the Rev. G. Bromby, who warmly welcomed the Cheltenham workers, as a ‘typical East End parish of the better sort.’ At this meeting the President introduced the subject by saying: ‘I trust we shall be able to try to win harmony out of notes not altogether concordant. Some of us come with a feeling of disappointment that the scheme we desired has been rejected;—I am one of these. I not only accept my defeat, I feel sure that you have sought guidance of that inward oracle which must ever be our supreme ruler, you have done what conscience bade, and so it is right. As regards my own scheme, I only allude to it to say, that having now to continue it single-handed, I cannot help you as much as I could wish, and I just refer to it to-day in the hope that you will remember it when I am no longer here.’