d-and-eighty more women or forty-five more horses
could leave Hammersmith between 9 A.M. and 9.30. So that if attache-cases
were forbidden the traffic problem would be practically solved.

Why shouldn't they be forbidden? It depends, of course, on what is inside
the cases; and nobody knows that for certain. But one can guess. I have
been guessing for a long time. At first I thought they were full of very
confidential papers. In the old days the attache-case was the peculiar
trademark of private secretaries and diplomats and high-up people like
that. Even attaches carried them sometimes. The very lowest a man with an
attache-case could be was a First-Class Civil Servant; and one was
justified in imagining confidential papers inside, or, at any rate,
home-work of the first importance. But nowadays there are too many of them
for that. The attache-case has been degraded; it is universal. This might
be because there is practically no male person alive just now who has not
been an adjutant at one time or another, and pinched at least one
attache-case from the orderly-room. But most of the cases in the Tube are
carried by females, so that theory is no good.

Well, then, I imagined sandwiches or knitting or powder-puffs or tea; but
those also are rotten hypotheses. I have too much faith in the good sense
of my fellow-countrywomen to believe that they would cart a horrible thing
like a cheap attache-case about simply in order to convey a sandwich or a
powder-puff from one end of London to the other. So I had to fall back on
my own experience.

I know, at any rate, what is inside mine. There are some rather grubby
envelopes which I borrowed from the House of Commons, and some very grubby
blotting-paper from the same source, and either a ream of foolscap or a
quire of foolscap, whichever is which; some pipe-cleaners and a few pieces
of milk-chocolate; and a letter from the Amalgamated Association of
Fish-Friers which ought to have been answered a long time ago; and a
memorandum on Hog-Importing which I am always going to read while waiting
at the station; and a nice piece of thick string with which I have tied a
bowline on a bight; and two broken pencils and some more envelopes; and a
Parliamentary Whip of last year and a stationery bill of the year before;
and several bills of my employer, not to mention a cheque for ninety-seven
pounds which I suppose he would like me to send to the bank; and a great
deal of fluff and a pipe or