For kindly solicitude no Frenchman, Swiss, German or Italian ever beat the old-fashioned English waiter, even if his gastronomical imagination was more limited. Bartenders are comrades, but barmaids are usually Gorgons. I crack a joke with my tailor, even when I owe him money, but I have never seen anything so common pass between the silk-gowned divinity of the dressmaking department and one of her respectful but determined clients: a simper on one side and a sniff on the other are the more usual small change which passes between the feminine server and the feminine served. There seems to be no good reason for this stiffness of Englishwomen. In ordinary social life these same women are as good-humoured as the rest of their kind, and we are not a crabbed race, however reserved we may be. It is, I think, partly a convention which might well be allowed to die, and partly due to the woman’s intense desire to live up to any position in which she may be placed. Her self-consciousness overwhelms her natural humanity, which is a pity, since geniality added to other feminine graces is irresistible. Women as employers or managers of others are not susceptible of generalisation: they can be very good and very bad. In this respect they have a less even level than men, whose administration, in general, is more exposed to pressure of public opinion and who, in all business relations, are less personal than women. A woman superior can inspire greater personal affection and more bitter personal antipathy in her subordinates, because she carries about with her wherever she goes all her good and bad qualities, while a man, if he is often too lazy to get the best out of his good ones, is equally slow to show the worst of his bad ones: where he at best will create a strong link of common endeavour among the whole of a personnel, a woman will forge chains of most intimate affection, but where he inspires fear and that dislike which is called “unpopularity,” she from sheer perversity can surround herself with an atmosphere of rebellious hatred. There is no doubt that the infinite capacity of Englishwomen at their best for tact and sympathy gives them an immense advantage over men in any kind of personal relation if they care to use it: a motherly employer can do infinitely more for the welfare and happiness of employees than the most fatherly, for men have a delicacy about intruding too far into individual circumstances, whereas there is nothing into which a sympathetic woman cannot inquire without embarrassment. Here, certainly, there is much progress before the Englishwoman. Outside the domestic sphere, she is still in her infancy as an employer, as an administrator or as an industrial organiser. She has so far failed to extend the happy touch with which she can conduct a household or a small personal business to the large concern or to the company, as though her grasp failed the moment she was out of immediate