There was one charwoman attached to a big block of buildings I once lived in, a little upright, dark, bright-eyed incarnation of energy—very different from most of the bent and wearied regiment—to whom I often gave a cup of tea and some work to do in my rooms just for the sake of hearing her opinions. Remarking to her one day that I supposed a great many daily workers, such as herself, had husbands, as many as half—the rest being widows, with the exception of a very small percentage of spinsters—she replied that well over two-thirds of them were either deserted wives or supporting their husbands in idleness. Her own husband had been a hard-working fellow and very good to her and her two children, till one time when he was out of work she had turned-to and gone out charing. From that time onward she had never had a penny from him, for herself or the children. For a time he had lived at home in idleness on her earnings; then—what an irony of fate!—got a good job and gone to live with another woman, who spent every penny of his wages on dress and luxuries, not even doling out to him sufficient for his weekly allowance of tobacco, as even the most niggardly wife would have done. But for the most part these defaulting husbands have “gone West”; and when a husband does that—leaving his wife behind to follow him later on, when he has got a job—she might as well ring down the curtain and realize at once that her married life, anyhow, as far as he is concerned, is at an end. In the heart of each individual wife hope lingers for a little while: “her Bill,” or “her Jim,” is not like the others, and at first letters and an occasional remittance may come pretty regularly. But in the ears of those who merely look on at the game the words “going West” ring like a knell, and God only knows what history of struggling hope, of poverty, of disillusion, and toil might be gathered round that one little phrase. As I write these women seem to visualize before my eyes; the work-bowed figures, the roughened hands, the tired faces, with their bright, eager eyes, all victims of the golden lure of the West, where the Victorian husbands seem to cast their conscience as easily as a snake casts its skin.