Reginald in Russia | Page 9

sense of the word? Granted the money, time, and energy, a
resolute course of shopping transactions would naturally result in
having one's ordinary domestic needs unfailingly supplied, whereas it is
notorious that women servants (and housewives of all classes) make it
almost a point of honour not to 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
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 years ago, we will call
Agatha.
"You're surely not buying blotting-paper HERE?" she exclaimed in an
agitated whisper, and she seemed so genuinely concerned that I stayed
my hand.
"Let me take you to Winks and Pinks," she said as soon as we were out
of the building: "they've got such lovely shades of blotting-
paper--pearl and heliotrope and momie and crushed--"
"But I want ordinary white blotting-paper," I said.
"Never mind. They know me