The women are not called upon to work for their board and lodging. The house is kept clean and orderly by a small staff engaged for the purpose. It would be no part of Christian courtesy to set five women to scrub the same table or to repolish door handles already burnished, while the degrading task of picking oakum is quite outside the Crispin scheme of things. It is true that the same women return again and again, unlike the postulants for the casual ward; but in one case the aim is to keep the destitute alive, in the other the required object is quite obviously to force them to die, or, at any rate, so to intimidate them that they do not come back.