In the tenements family life is disturbed and often threatened with disintegration by the sheer physical conditions of the home. Where there is no privacy there is inevitable loss of the support and strength that come from the interchange of confidences and assurance of understanding. I felt this anew when I called upon Henrietta on the evening of the day her father died. The tie between father and daughter had been close. When I sought to express the sympathy that even the strong and self-reliant need, so crowded were the little rooms that we were forced to sit together on the tenement-house stairs, amid the coming and going of sympathetic and excited neighbors, and all the passing and repassing of the twenty other families that the house sheltered. It would have been impossible for anyone to offer, in the midst of that curious though not ill-meaning crowd, the solace she so sadly needed. Emotional experiences cannot be made public without danger of blunting or coarsening the fiber of character. Privacy is needed for intimate talks, even between mother and daughter. The casual nature of the employment of the unskilled has also its bearing upon the family relationship. The name or address of the place of employment of the various members of the family is often not known. “How could I know Louisa was in trouble?” said a simple mother of our neighborhood. “She is a good girl to me. I don’t know where she works. I don’t know her friends.” And the wide span that stretches between the conventions of one generation and another must also be reckoned with. The clash between them, unhappily familiar to many whose experiences never become known outside the family circle, is likely to be intensified when the Americanized wage-earning son or daughter reverses the relationship of child and parent by becoming the protector and the link between the outside world and the home. The service of the settlement as interpreter seems in this narrower sphere almost as useful as its attempts to bring about understanding between separated sections of society. [Illustration] One evening an eloquent speaker addressing a senior group dwelt upon the hardships of the older people and the obligations of their children to them. The young women lingered after the speaker had gone, discussing the lecture and applying it to themselves. Though sensitive to the appeal, they were loath to relinquish their right to self-expression. One girl thought her parents demanded an impossible sacrifice by insisting on living in a street to which she was ashamed to bring her associates. The parents refused to leave the quarter where their countrymen dwelt, and although the daughter willingly gave her earnings and paid tribute to her mother’s devotion and housekeeping skill, she said she felt irritated and mortified every time she returned to her home.