There is no hard-and-fast line separating any group of workers from another. If social distinctions divide population into horizontal sections, industry cuts through these sections vertically. Class _G._, or the lower middle class, enter the upper branches of the industries to which I have referred. The girls here do not enter the factories or become domestic servants to any extent worth considering. They form the majority of the shop-assistants in the West End and the richer suburbs, and more than any other class supply the elementary schools with teachers. It is as teachers, and also as Civil Service clerks, that they join the upper middle class, including under that term the professional, manufacturing, and trading classes. In treating of this third group of working women I shall confine myself entirely to the position of women in class _H._, partly because my experience as a high-school teacher has brought me into special relations with girls and women of that class who have to earn their living, and partly because their unconscious even more than conscious influence on the habits and ideals of the girls in the lower middle class is very great. In every class but class _H._ the girls can, if they choose, enter industries conducted by employers with a view to profit. In the section of the factory class where the girls are obliged to be self-supporting there is a point below which wages cannot fall for any considerable period; there is a point above which it would not pay the employers to employ them. The standard of living is, unfortunately, a very low one, and the wages are low; but single women in this class can support themselves so long as they are in work. In the second group there is again a maximum height to which wages might be pushed by combination; so long as it is profitable to employ them they will be employed, however high the wages demanded may be. But the minimum wage is not equivalent to the cost of living, but is rather determined by the cost of living minus the cost of house-room and part of the cost of food. In class _H._ women are not employed to produce commodities which have a definite market value, and have therefore no means of measuring their utility by market price. They nearly all perform services for persons who pay them out of fixed income, and make no pecuniary profit by employing them. And there is no rate at which we can say that the supply of these services will cease; for the desire to be usefully employed is so strong in educated women, and their opportunities of being profitably employed (in the economic sense of the word “profitable”) are so few, that they will give their services for a year to people as well off as themselves in return for a sum of money barely sufficient to take them abroad for a month or to keep them supplied with gloves, lace, hats, and other necessary trifles. Chaos reigns supreme. And while in this class it seems to be considered