“I live among my friends. That is the point,” explained Miss Newton. “I don’t come from Belgravia, or from a fashionable terrace in Kensington, and tell them they ought to keep their wretched rooms cleaner, and open their windows and put flower-pots on their window-sills. I live here, and they can come and see how I keep _my_ rooms, and judge for themselves. Their landlord is my landlord; and a nice life I lead him about water, and whitewash, and drains. He is thoroughly afraid of me, I am happy to say, and generally bolts round a corner when he sees me in the street; but I am too quick for his over-fed legs. I tackle him about all his shortcomings, and he finds it easier to spend a few pounds upon his property now and then than to have _me_ upon his heels at every turn; so now Crook’s tenements have quite a reputation in Lambeth. If you were to see the old dragon you would wonder at my pluck in attacking him, I can assure you.” “Your whole life is wonderful to me, Miss Newton; and I only wish there were hundreds of women in this big city living just as you live. Tell me, please, what kind of people your neighbours are.” “Oh, there are people of all kinds, some of course who are quite impracticable, for whom I can do nothing; but there are many more who are glad of my friendship, and who receive me with open arms. The single women and widows are my chief friends, and some of those I know as well as if we had been brought up and educated upon the same social level. They are workwomen of all kinds, tailoresses, shirt-makers, girls who work for military outfitters, extra hands for Court dressmakers, shop-girls at the humbler class of shops, shoe-binders, artificial-flower-makers. I wonder whether you would like to see some of them.” “I should like it very much indeed.” “Then perhaps you will come to one of my tea-parties. I give two tea-parties a week all through the winter, to just as many of my women friends as this room will hold. It holds about twenty very comfortably, so I make twenty-five the outside limit. We rather enjoy a little bit of a crush—and I give my invitations so that they all have such pleasure as I can give them, fairly, turn and turn about. We do not begin our evening too early, for the working hours are precious to my poor things. We take tea at eight o’clock, and we seldom separate before half-past eleven—just as if we were at a theatre. We have a little music, a little reading and recitation, and sometimes a round game at cards. When we are in a wild humour we play dumb-crambo, or even puss-in-the-corner; and we have always a great deal of talk. We sit round this fireplace in a double semi-circle, the younger ones sitting on the rug in front of us elders, and we talk, and talk, and talk—about ourselves mostly, and you can’t think what good it does us. Surely God gave man speech as the universal safety-valve. It lets off half our troubles, and half our sense of the world’s injustice.”