of the book, its author, and who published it, but how to get into
actual contact with it is still an unsolved problem to her. You
write back pointing out that to have recourse to an ironmonger or a
corn-dealer will only entail delay and disappointment, and suggest
an application to a bookseller as the most hopeful thing you can
think of. In a day or two she writes again: "It is all right; I
have borrowed it from your aunt." Here, of course, we have an
example of the Beyond-Shopper, one who has learned the Better Way,
but the helplessness exists even when such bypaths of relief are
closed. A lady who lives in the West End was expressing to me the
other day her interest in West Highland terriers, and her desire to
know more about the breed, so when, a few days later, I came across
an exhaustive article on that subject in the current number of one
of our best known outdoor-life weeklies, I mentioned that
circumstance in a letter, giving the date of that number. "I cannot
get the paper," was her telephoned response. And she couldn't. She
lived in a city where newsagents are numbered, I suppose, by the
thousand, and she must have passed dozens of such shops in her daily
shopping excursions, but as far as she was concerned that article on
West Highland terriers might as well have been written in a missal
stored away in some Buddhist monastery in Eastern Thibet.

The brutal directness of the masculine shopper arouses a certain
combative derision in the feminine onlooker. A cat that spreads one
shrew-mouse over the greater part of a long summer afternoon, and
then possibly loses him, doubtless feels the same contempt for the
terrier who compresses his rat into ten seconds of the strenuous
life. I was finishing off a short list of purchases a few
afternoons ago when I was discovered by a lady of my acquaintance
whom, swerving aside from the lead given us by her godparents thirty