“Yes,” said Lady Harman. “And what is it exactly that is to take the place of these isolated little homes and these dreary little lodgings? Here are we, my husband and I, rushing in with this new thing, just as he rushed in with his stores thirty years ago and overset little bakers and confectioners and refreshment dealers by the hundred. Some of them—poor dears—they——I don’t like to think. And it wasn’t a good thing he made after all,—only a hard sort of thing. He made all those shops of his—with the girls who strike and say they are sweated and driven.... And now here we are making a kind of barrack place for people to live in!” She expressed the rest of her ideas with a gesture of the hands. “I admit the process has its dangers,” said Mr. Brumley. “It’s like the supersession of the small holdings by the _latifundia_ in Italy. But that’s just where our great opportunity comes in. These synthetic phases have occurred before in the world’s history and their history is a history of lost opportunities.... But need ours be?” She had a feeling as though something had slipped through her fingers. “I feel,” she said, “that it is more important to me than anything else in life, that these Hostels, anyhow, which are springing so rapidly from a chance suggestion of mine, shouldn’t be lost opportunities.” “Exactly,” said Mr. Brumley, with the gesture of one who recovers a thread. “That is just what I am driving at.” The fingers of his extended hand felt in the warm afternoon air for a moment, and then he said “Ah!” in a tone of recovery while she waited respectfully for the resumed thread. “You see,” he said, “I regard this process of synthesis, this substitution of wholesale and collective methods for homely and individual ones as, under existing conditions, inevitable—inevitable. It’s the phase we live in, it’s to this we have to adapt ourselves. It is as little under your control or mine as the movement of the sun through the zodiac. Practically, that is. And what we have to do is not, I think, to sigh for lost homes and the age of gold and spade husbandry, and pigs and hens in the home, and so on, but to make this new synthetic life tolerable for the mass of men and women, hopeful for the mass of men and women, a thing developing and ascending. That’s where your Hostels come in, Lady Harman; that’s where they’re so important. They’re a pioneer movement. If they succeed—and things in Sir Isaac’s hands have a way of succeeding at any rate to the paying point—then there’ll be a headlong rush of imitations, imitating your good features, imitating your bad features, deepening a groove.... You see my point?” “Yes,” she said. “It makes me—more afraid than ever.” “But hopeful,” said Mr. Brumley, presuming to lay his hand for an instant on her arm. “It’s big enough to be inspiring.” “But I’m afraid,” she said.