d Mr. Brumley hastily. "The extraordinary thing is
that, until you set me looking into these things with your questions,
I've always taken this sort of thing for granted, as though it couldn't
be otherwise. Now I seem to see with a kind of freshness. I'm astounded
at the muddle of it, the waste and aimlessness of it. And here again it
is, Lady Harman, that I think your opportunity comes in. With these
Hostels as they might be projected now, you seem to have the possibility
of a modernized, more collective and civilized family life than the old
close congestion of the single home, and I see no reason at all why you
shouldn't carry that collective life on to the married stage. As things
are now these little communities don't go beyond the pairing--and out
they drift to find the homestead they will never possess. What has been
borne in upon me more and more forcibly as I have gone through
your--your nest of problems, is the idea that the new social--association,
that has so extensively replaced the old family group, might be carried
on right through life, that it might work in with all sorts of other
discontents and bad adjustments.... The life of the women in these little
childless or one-or-two-child homes is more unsatisfactory even than the
man's."

Mr. Brumley's face flushed with enthusiasm and he wagged a finger to
emphasize his words. "Why not make Hostels, Lady Harman, for married
couples? Why not try that experiment so many people have talked about of
the conjoint kitchen and refectory, the conjoint nursery, the collective
social life, so that the children who are single children or at best
children in small families of two or three, may have the advantages of
playfellows, and the young mothers still, if they choose, continue to
have a social existence and go on with their professional or business,
work? That's the next step your Hostels might take ... Incidentally you
see this opens a way to a life of relative freedom for the woman who is
married.... I don't know if you have read Mrs. Stetson. Yes, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman Stetson.... Yes, _Woman and Economics_, that's the book.

"I know," Mr. Brumley went on, "I seem to be opening out your project
like a concertina, but I want you to see just how my thoughts have been
going about all this. I want you to realize I haven't been idle during
these last few weeks. I know it's a far cry from what the Hostels are to
all these ideas of what they might begin to be, I kno