In August I asked for a “match-girls’ drawing-room.”  “It will want a piano, tables for papers, for games, for light literature; so that it may offer a bright, homelike refuge to these girls, who now have no real homes, no playground save the streets.  It is not proposed to build an ‘institution’ with stern and rigid discipline and enforcement of prim behaviour, but to open a home, filled with the genial atmosphere of cordial comradeship, and self-respecting freedom—­the atmosphere so familiar to all who have grown up in the blessed shelter of a happy home, so strange, alas! to too many of our East London girls.”  In the same month of August, two years later, H.P.  Blavatsky opened such a home.

Then came a cry for help from South London, from tin-box makers, illegally fined, and in many cases grievously mutilated by the non-fencing of machinery; then aid to shop assistants, also illegally fined; legal defences by the score still continued; a vigorous agitation for a free meal for children, and for fair wages to be paid by all public bodies; work for the dockers and exposure of their wrongs; a visit to the Cradley Heath chain-makers, speeches to them, writing for them; a contest for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets division, and triumphant return at the head of the poll.  Such were some of the ways in which the autumn days were spent, to say nothing of scores of lectures—­Secularist, Labour, Socialist—­and scores of articles written for the winning of daily bread.  When the School Board work was added I felt that I had as much work as one woman’s strength could do.

Thus was ushered in 1889, the to me never-to-be-forgotten year in which I found my way “Home,” and had the priceless good fortune of meeting, and of becoming the pupil of, H.P.  Blavatsky.  Ever more and more had been growing on me the feeling that something more than I had was needed for the cure of social ills.  The Socialist position sufficed on the economic side, but where to gain the inspiration, the motive, which should lead to the realisation of the Brotherhood of Man?  Our efforts to really organise bands of unselfish workers had failed.  Much indeed had been done, but there was not a real movement of self-sacrificing devotion, in which men worked for Love’s sake only, and asked but to give, not to take.  Where was the material for the nobler Social Order, where the hewn stones for the building of the Temple of Man?  A great despair would oppress me as I sought for such a movement and found it not.

[Illustration:  MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS’ UNION.]

Not only so; but since 1886 there had been slowly growing up a conviction that my philosophy was not sufficient; that life and mind were other than, more than, I had dreamed.  Psychology was advancing with rapid strides; hypnotic experiments were revealing unlooked-for complexities in human consciousness, strange riddles of multiplex personalities, and, most startling of all, vivid intensities of mental action