So in the calm of these days the Puritanical fury of three hundred and twenty years ago, filtered through three centuries, goes on and on and on in the City of London! If the worthy old citizens came back from the Shades they would not be able to find their old church, but the Voice they subsidized still speaks, and the property they left ... well, they would have the shock of their lives! Not for Women The place is generally blue with smoke and it smells strongly of grilled chops. It is full of men: men eating and talking. Some do not remove their overcoats or hats, although the rooms are uncomfortably warm. This spot is remarkable only for the fact that it is one of the last eating-houses in London which does not cater for or encourage women. Sometimes a woman finds her way in, and all the men look up curiously, as early Victorians might have done to see a lone woman in a chop-house. They blink at her. They watch her covertly as she eats, not impudently, but with a slight pity, for she is, poor thing, unwittingly transgressing an unwritten law. She has no right to be there! Generations of males have marked this place out as a feeding-place, and the funny thing is that no matter how you admire women generally, and adore some individually, you feel unhappy when you see one there. You want to put a screen round her and forget her. She is all wrong there. It is like going to your tailors and finding a pretty girl being measured for a costume. It surprises and unsettles your conception of the fitness of things! Through the smoke and the stimulating smell--which I believe is a kind of barrage put up against the feminine--move women and girls of a type quite different from the usual waitress. They resemble more the handmaids of inns in, say, the time of Sterne. They have a sharp, ready way with them, and they regard the zoo of hungry men dependent on them with the faint superiority of the ministering female. They treat elderly barristers who inquire testily for an overdue sausage rather like a school matron reproving a greedy boy. How efficient they are! They blow down a tube and order all at once a sole, two grilled sausages, liver and bacon, a chop and apple tart, and never do they make a mistake in their destinations. At first sight you might think that everybody comes here because it is cheap. A second glance shows you a curious assortment. There are celebrated barristers--the Lord Chief Justice often used to go there when he was Attorney-General--solicitors, journalists, at least one solemn editor of a literary monthly, and a floating population of publishers' readers, poets, authors, and others with business in the Street of Misadventure. On your left two barristers discuss a case, on your right two newspaper men whisper all the things not yet printed in a murder or conspiracy trial, and in the corner two or three men who have not lost their undergraduate voices argue about an unpublished novel.