be supplied with everyday necessities. "We shall be out of starch
by Thursday," they say with fatalistic foreboding, and by Thursday
they are out of starch. They have predicted almost to a minute the
moment when their supply would give out and if Thursday happens to
be early closing day their triumph is complete. A shop where starch
is stored for retail purposes possibly stands at their very door,
but the feminine mind has rejected such an obvious source for
replenishing a dwindling stock. "We don't deal there" places it at
once beyond the pale of human resort. And it is noteworthy that,
just as a sheep-worrying dog seldom molests the flocks in his near
neighbourhood, so a woman rarely deals with shops in her immediate
vicinity. The more remote the source of supply the more fixed seems
to be the resolve to run short of the commodity. The Ark had
probably not quitted its last moorings five minutes before some
feminine voice gloatingly recorded a shortage of bird-seed. A few
days ago two lady acquaintances of mine were confessing to some
mental uneasiness because a friend had called just before lunch-
time, and they had been unable to ask her to stop and share their
meal, as (with a touch of legitimate pride) "there was nothing in
the house." I pointed out that they lived in a street that bristled
with provision shops and that it would have been easy to mobilise a
very passable luncheon in less than five minutes. "That," they said
with quiet dignity, "would not have occurred to us," and I felt that
I had suggested something bordering on the indecent.

But it is in catering for her literary wants that a woman's shopping
capacity breaks down most completely. If you have perchance
produced a book which has met with some little measure of success,
you are certain to get a letter from some lady whom you scarcely
known to bow to, asking you "how it can be got." She knows the name