It is strange that this oppression of women which is the cause of my greatest sorrow should also be the cause of my keenest joy. But it is so! And why? Because I number two thousand of these underworld women slaves among my personal friends, and I am proud of it! The letters I have given are a few out of hundreds that I have received. I know these women as few know them. I know their sufferings and their virtues, their great content and their little requirements. I know that they have the same capabilities for happiness as other people, and I know that they get precious little chance of exercising those capabilities. Strange again, I get no begging letters from them, though I do from others who are better placed. I declare it to be wonderful! This endurance and patience of London's miserably paid women. I tell you that I am the happiest man alive! Why? Because during the present year a thousand of my poor friends from the underworld came up for a time and had a fortnight, a whole fortnight's rest each with food and comfort in a beautiful rest home by the sea. For kind friends have enabled me to build one for them and for them alone! And I was there sometimes to see, and it was good for me. So Mrs. Holmes and myself make frequent visits to the rest home, and every time we visit it we become more and more convinced that not only is it a "Palace Beautiful," but that it is also a joy to the slave women who have the good fortune to spend a holiday (all too short) in it. Gloom cannot enter "Singholm" or, if it does enter, it promptly and absolutely disappears. Ill-temper cannot live there, the very flowers smile it away. The atmosphere itself acts like "laughing gas." So the house fairly rings with merry laughter from elderly staid women equally as from the younger ones, whose contact with serious and saddening life has not been so paralysing to joyous emotions. It did us good to hear such jolly laughter from throats and organs that, but for Singholm, must have rusted and decayed. One of our trustees was with us, it being his first visit to the home. I know that he was surprised at the size, the beauty, the comfort and refinement of the whole place. The garden filled him with delight, the skill of the architect in planning the building, together with the style, gave him increased pleasure. The great drawing-room and the equally large dining-room rather astonished him. The little bedrooms he declared perfect. But what astonished him most of all was the unaffected happiness of the women; for this I do not think he was prepared. Well, as I have said, gloom cannot live in Singholm, and this I have found out by personal experience, for if I am quite cross and grumpy in London, I cannot resist the exhilaration that prevails at Singholm among London's underworld women. I think I may say that our trustee was surprised at something else! But then he is a bachelor, and so of course does not understand the infinite resources of femininity.