Reviewing this chapter, I see that I have dealt almost exclusively with large establishments. In smaller ones and especially in poor districts the food and housing may be worse, and the payment will almost certainly be lower. On the other hand the regulations will in all likelihood be less rigid and sometimes the relations between employer and employed will be quite human and even homelike. Of the general conditions in a thoroughly low class shop, Mr Maxwell’s _Vivien_ presents a picture faithful probably in most particulars. A more typical case, illuminated by a spark of real genius, is portrayed in Mr Wells’s _Kipps_; and there is an admirable vignette in Gissing’s _The Odd Women_. It is only just to add that neither the somewhat exhaustive investigations made under the auspices of the Women’s Industrial Council nor such information as, during a considerable course of years, I have been able to collect personally, confirm those accusations of prevalent immorality which might be suggested by such novels as Zola’s _Au Bonheur des Dames_, and which are freely made in some quarters. No doubt instances must from time to time occur in which a shopwalker or an employer makes use of his position as a weapon of seduction; but such instances are certainly the exception. There may also possibly have existed, somewhere, at some time, a basis of fact for that persistent legend of the employer who offers to young women the free use of a latch key by way of compensation for low payment. For the large majority of shop girls, however, the temptations of shop life take the form not of illicit lovemaking within the shop but rather of continued dulness, driving and discomfort, constantly pressing them towards any offered means of escape. The passion that really prevails in the modern shop is the passion for money, which, no less than more lurid passions preferred by the romance writer, devours the youth and lives of girls. It does not, however, consciously fall under the classification of the decalogue, and the destroyers of these victims often honestly believe themselves to be men of singular righteousness and virtue, the pillars and bulwarks of an industrious, commercial nation. The feudal baron, not improbably regarded himself in no very different light. _Note._ The daily papers of the week in which this chapter was written contained two cases that corroborate the statements made in it; and that show the evils described to be by no means matters of the past. I give them verbatim, except that in the second case I have concealed the name of the accused lad. George A. Evans, coffee-shop keeper, of Goldsmith’s Row, Hackney Road, was summoned at Old Street for breaches of the Shop Hours Act by employing two young persons as waitresses for more than 74 hours in any one week.