“What a magician is love,” thought Gwendolen, when she retired that night to her bedroom, after long hours of conversation with her father. What could Nettie teach her now? Still she kept the sprightly little guide by her, to help her in working out the problems of social reforms. The two reformers put their clever heads together, and assisted by Eva Carey—Gwendolen’s bosom friend—they organised several guilds for the purpose of bringing together the East-End factory girls and the West-End fair damsels. They came to the conclusion that the West-Enders had been often enough in the dark continent of Stepney, Hackney, and Bow, to amuse, sing or recite, read and teach the poor isolated classes, who, after all, knew no more of their instructors and entertainers than if they had come down from the planet Mars. The three friends thought this time they would have the East-End on a visit to the West-End, and on their own ground would make them acquainted with that world which they had only read about in penny shockers. Since the disappearance of clothes, misery had lost a good deal of its sting, and envy and rancour were things of the past civilisation. Hitherto the craving for money had robbed our world of the one virtue which opens every heart to sympathy: Pity. How could a factory girl, who struggled on five shillings a week, ever imagine that the owner of a West-End mansion needed sympathy? Money was the great soother, and in the eyes of those who did not eat enough, it granted one the privileges of eating more than your fill, of lying in bed when having a headache, of taking a holiday when run down in health; it even went so far, in their ignorant minds, as to pad the aching throbs of a broken heart. The East-Ender knew no limit to what money could do, because he had none himself and was convinced that to possess in abundance the things which he sorely lacked must doubtless be the cause of all happiness. He was so grossly one-sided and ignorant that he was inclined to believe that even the laws of nature could be altered by the power of riches; but however foolish he may have been, he was not alone in judging in this dogmatic manner. The West-Ender was equally uninformed as to what lay beneath the sordid rags of the classes of which he knew nothing; he endowed the poorer classes with a callousness of feeling which at first sight seemed in keeping with their reeky clothes and shabby environments, and denied them any particle of that romance which he believed could only be the privilege of the well-dressed. And thus the two antipodes of London lived in a baneful ignorance of one another. But now that the vanishing of toggery had laid bare the two hearts of our social world, Gwen was determined to put the picture of humanity in proper perspective, and to soften the crudity of light and darkness that had been so offensive to both parties. Over and over again Gwen gathered her friends and her friends’ friends in the various parks of London.