A visit to any aeroplane factory repeats the hint, and reveals the extraordinary versatility of skill latent in women, which can well be applied to this form of industry. 'Women _must_ have been cabin'd, cribbed, and confined before the war', said a foreman in taking me over his shop in an aircraft works. 'Look what they can do at this kind of job, and yet many of them are ladies, from homes where they sat about and were waited upon.' The wonder of it cannot fail to impress a visitor, since only four years ago women were allowed to undertake in aircraft construction merely those parts which convention deemed suitable for feminine fingers: such processes, for instance, as the sewing of the wings by hand, or by machine, or the painting of the woodwork. [Illustration: ENGRAVING METAL PARTS FOR COMPASSES] [Illustration: COLOURING AEROPLANE PLANES] [Illustration: CHIPPING AND GRINDING BLADES OF CAST IRON PROPELLER WITH PORTABLE TOOLS] [Illustration: WOMAN ACTING AS MATE TO JOINER. MAKING SEA-PLANE FLOATS] To-day, they undertake almost every other process both at the carpenter's bench and in the engineering shop, and the chief impression you carry away from a stroll through such a factory is that the women are thoroughly at home in the work. The operations are often so clean that the workers' overalls and caps of the daintiest shades of pink, blue, white, and heliotrope, remain fresh; the material for aeroplane parts is usually so light that the handling of it presents no difficulty to a slip of a girl. When within the works, the visitor is constantly stimulated to the thought that the hand which rocks the cradle should obviously be the one to make the air-machine. One expects, of course, women's familiarity with the occupation in the room where the fine Irish linen is cut out and fashioned into wings. One is not surprised at the facility with which the measuring and cutting out are accomplished, and, maybe, an emotion of admiration arises, similar to that evoked by the contemplation of old tapestries, when one watches the hand-sewing of a seam in a wing of some 10 feet in length. Not a stitch of the button-holing of such a seam deviates by a hairbreadth from its fellows. Such work has, however, been women's province through the ages. But a new sensation is awakened in the carpenter's shop where women are working with dexterity at the bench, handling woodwork like the men, now dealing with delicate wooden ribs, or again, fashioning propellers out of mahogany or walnut with such nicety that there is not the slightest deviation between the dimensions of a pair. In the room where the linen is stretched over the wooden ribs, I have seen women working with tiny hammers, giving fairy blows that never miss their mark on tiny nails.