Their freedom to do what? Freedom to toil at some soul-deadening task for eight or ten hours to earn a shilling—for the whole round of the clock to gain eighteenpence. Freedom to live crowded in noisome rooms among ever-shifting “neighbours,” to go untidy, to eat bad food ill-cooked. Freedom on Bank holidays with their rowdy crowds; freedom (when one is not too tired) to run about the gas-lit streets, or to sit in tobacco-reeking music-halls; freedom, in such dangerous proximity to the hospital, the casual ward, the pauper’s grave! Lucy thought of what she understood by freedom. A life of useful labour, leisure for friendship, books, the joys of music and of pictures, of flowers and sunset skies, of wild wood and breezy shore. And then she reflected. If it should be this kind of freedom that girls wanted—the sort of thing that Lucy herself meant by freedom—could she promise them that this was to be found in average domestic service any more than that other freedom for which the poor souls around her were willing to pay so dear? “The matter has got out of joint somehow,” she thought. “New social ideals, both good and bad, have gained sway in these days, and I fear that the majority of the mistresses have tried to shut out both from influencing the ways of domestic service. The consequence is, the bad ideals have withdrawn the mass of girls from household life. I should not wonder but the mothers of most of these girls have been domestic servants. Yet what they have told their daughters (possibly quite as often in commendation and praise as in bitterness and warning) has not attracted the girls, because they are not living in the same world as their mothers lived, and they have picked up the fact that domestic service is, in the main, left stationary in the out-of-date sphere.” Lucy knew that she had not got her own progressive ideas concerning domestic service in her own parents’ house. She had got suggestions when visiting in the houses of schoolfellows belonging to thoughtfully “advanced” families, and these suggestions had opened her eyes to see the connection between this department of human life and the teachings she found in the best books she came across. Miss Latimer herself had often been helpful. Also when once Lucy’s days of courtship and marriage had begun, there was a fresh humanity in all Charlie’s ways of looking at things, which permeated her mind, and carried away lingering prejudices and preconceptions as a sweet breeze blows away the stuffiness of long-closed chambers.