“There’s all that business of the margarine,” said Susan. “Every branch gets its butter under weight,—the water squeezes out,—and every branch has over weight margarine. Of course the rules say that mixing’s forbidden and if they get caught they go, but they got to pay-in for that butter, and it’s setting a snare for their feet. People who’ve never thought to cheat, when they get it like that, day after day, they cheat, my lady.... And the girls get left food for rations. There’s always trouble, it’s against what the rules say, but they get it. Of course it’s against the rules, but what can a manageress do?—if the waste doesn’t fall on them, it falls on her. She’s tied there with her savings.... Such driving, my lady, it’s against the very spirit of God. It makes scoffers point. It makes people despise law and order. There’s Luke, he gets bitterer and bitterer; he says that it’s in the Word we mustn’t muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn, but these Stores, he says, they’d muzzle the ox and keep it hungry and make it work a little machine, he says, whenever it put down its head in the hope of finding a scrap....” So Susan, bright-eyed, flushed and voluble, pleading the cause of that vague greatness in humanity that would love, that would loiter, that would think, that would if it could give us art, delight and beauty, that turns blindly and stumblingly towards joy, towards intervals, towards the mysterious things of the spirit, against all this sordid strenuousness, this driving destructive association of hardfisted peasant soul and Ghetto greed, this fool’s “efficiency,” that rules our world to-day. Then Susan lunged for a time at the waitress life her sister led. “She has ’er ’ome with us, but some—they haven’t homes.” “They make a fuss about all this White Slave Traffic,” said Susan, “but if ever there were white slaves it’s the girls who work for a living and keep themselves respectable. And nobody wants to make an example of the men who get rich out of _them_....” And after some hearsay about the pressure in the bake-houses and the accidents to the van-men, who worked on a speeding-up system that Sir Isaac had adopted from an American business specialist, Susan’s mental discharge poured out into the particulars of the waitresses’ strike and her sister’s share in that. “She _would_ go into it,” said Susan, “she let herself be drawn in. I asked her never to take the place. Better Service, I said, a thousand times. I begged her, I could have begged her on my bended knees....” The immediate cause of the strike it seemed was the exceptional disagreeableness of one of the London district managers. “He takes advantage of his position,” repeated Susan with face aflame, and Lady Harman was already too wise about Susan’s possibilities to urge her towards particulars....