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