An intricate case winds its slow way through masses of detail, detail, significant to lawyers, mean-ingles to the man on the street. Freed from the obligation of note-taking the reporter stares through the windows of the court-room eud on the Huangpu, gray, apparently motionless, as if with a shimmery white coating stretched over black depths.
On either side dark masses of buildings present an uneven skyline, the time-ball shaft standing out like a monument. The colour is more like a dark brown than a black. Gray mist grows more enfolding. Yellow lights prick out along the roadway.
Darker brown shapes drift athwart the river, sampans, junks, the crew the same colour as ths craft. One cargo, white sacks of flour, another wooden boxes, some. indistinguishable masses.
The sky, lacking the metallic shimmer is softer gray than the river. Sails stand out against it, black, brown, rust colour. Tugs chug by, puffing oyster-gray smoke. The dusk hangs suspended, the darkness not advancing. Star lights on masts come sailing along the channel. Stars begin to twinkle the paile sky.
Indoors the reporters glance at the clock. The visitors straggle ovis one by one. The darkness thickens. The casa is adjourned. The pageant of approaching night is ended. woman trained to factory work would be of little service in a middle-class house.
Beside this bright spot there is a very black one, and it-is the number of women daily offering themselves for unskilled jobs in any capacity, at any wage, at the various industrial centres, owing to the flood of girl workers. Vaitrosses are a drug on the market; the headquarters of the various teashops have an unending stream of applicants, some trained, some untrained, with the obvious temptation to lower the rates of wages where competition for employment is so keen. One of the exchanges recently sent a girl wf 23, living alone in a single room, to apply for a post at 10s. a week in a foreign cafe open to 2 a.m. 4 The only suggested solution of the difficulty is the raising of the school age to 16, thus keeping the young girl under tuition and affording a chance of employment in the factories to the girls and women who were formerly employed there.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.