In writing about the girls’ room, I mean to consider a great deal more than decoration, though naturally that will not be neglected, for I am more and more convinced as years go by that something definite must be done in the way of providing for the women who flood the market and struggle--alas! that it should be so--in the open streets with men for their living, instead of contenting themselves with being the helpmeets of those with whom they wage this unseemly warfare. I have a very strong opinion that people should not bring into the world any more children than they can reasonably hope to equip in some measure for the fight. Boys can always make their way, women cannot; and though I do not agree with Mr. Besant, who declares that women hate work and do not wish ever to do anything, I do think that no woman should be obliged to work for mere food and clothes--at all events in the ranks above the lower middle classes; and that no woman’s constitution can stand the anxiety of providing her own sustenance, and at the same time doing work to procure this sustenance; for anxiety paralyses a woman, and the more she is obliged to take thought for the morrow the less able is she to ensure the morrow’s being provided for by her work. She should, therefore, never be placed in a position in which she is literally forced out into public strife, unless from her very earliest days she has been brought up among workers and taught that her future can be nothing but severe toil. Can one speak too strongly of the wicked selfishness of people who bring ten or eleven children into the world, knowing that, were they to die to-morrow, the unhappy creatures would either starve, or do worse than starve in the workhouse or in one of those excellent and stony-hearted institutions where the child becomes a unit among hundreds of uniformed units, with never a pretty frock or sash among them, and never a chance of anything save work outside the walls and of an ultimate grave?--of the insensate and odious conduct of those parents who bring up their children to have every single thing they require, and then, when the girls do not marry and grow old at home, leave them penniless when totally unable to work, because they have never known they must--never have learned a single thing worth knowing, and that they must either starve genteelly or live on their overburdened relations, or add to the already fearful number of people who paint dreadful little tables and tambourines, sew infamously, or try the thousand and one ways of making a little money, which cheapen the market and bring institutions for the sale of work done by ladies into the profoundest contempt? I say that the State should interfere, and force a man to lay by for his daughters, at least so much that will keep them from such an end, or to give them such an education that at any moment they could work--could do the work that from their earliest days they should learn is waiting for them in