g life, ours and yet not our own."

The last novel published at the time I write is _The Wife of Sir Isaac
Harman_ (1914). The same theme is presented, but in other
circumstances. Ellen Sawbridge, when she married, at eighteen, the
founder and proprietor of "The International Bread Shops," was an
ingenuous schoolgirl; and for more than seven years the change from a
relatively independent poverty to the luxuries she could enjoy as the
wife of a man who had not outgrown the Eastern theory with regard to
the position of women, sufficed to keep her reasonably content. Mr
Brumley was the instrument of Fate that seriously disturbed her
satisfaction; but she must have come to much the same crisis, if Mr
Brumley had never existed. Brumley was a writer, but he was not one of
"the really imaginative people, the people with vision, the people who
let themselves go"--I quote the expression of George Wilkins, the
novelist--and Lady Harman never fell very deeply in love with him.
Nevertheless it was through Brumley's interference with her life that
she faced the crux of her position as the closely restricted occupant
of "a harem of one." She never broke out of that cage. One desperate
effort led her, by way of a suffragist demonstration on a post office
window, to a month's freedom in prison; but Sir Isaac and society were
too clever and too strong for her. When she was enlarged from the
solitude of confinement in a cell, she was tricked and bullied into
the resumption of her marital engagements. And presumably she must
have continued to act as the nurse of her now invalid husband for the
rest of her life, suffering the indignities of his abuse and the
restrictions of liberty that the paid attendant may escape by a change
of situation, if release had not come through Sir Isaac's death. By
that time Lady Harman had learnt her lesson. I am distinctly sorry for
Mr Brumley, but I should have been seriously disappointed in Ellen
Harman if she had consented to marry him.

Thus far I have only traced an imperfect outline of what I take to be
the more important motive of the book. But there is a second pattern
hardly less essential--namely, the criticism of the management and, _a
fortiori_, of the conception of principle, in relation to the
International Bread Shops. Arising out of this interwoven theme we
come to some examination of the status of the female employee in
general, and particularly in connection with the question of their
boa