Twenty-five years ago Barry Pain wrote an account of a woman's restaurant into which he had stumbled by accident, to find one lady lunching on oxtail soup, coffee and preserved ginger ('they combine a little wildly," he commented) and to realize that by some unwritten law it was a place where only women went to eat. Beadell's, in Vere Street (it has moved now, we believe), was actually known by our grandmothers as one of the very few places where a lady might go alone to eat publicly yet with propriety. How far we have gone beyond these restrictions was shown recently at the annual meeting of a big London firm of caterers, when the chairman attributed their in. creased profits chiefly to the healthy meals of modern women. Time was, he said, when well-dressed ladies came into their restaurants, _occupied the best seats, and remained a long time consuming a glass of milk and a bun." Now, he supposed,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.