Yes, she is a very bright girl, just as well informed on any other subject you like to mention—excepting fish! There she draws a woeful blank: she has no more notion how to tell fresh fish at sight than a baby!
Still, she is generous in her intentions, and as no one ever thinks of journeying to the cottage without taking something in the eatable line—it is only right to take a little present when you go to stay with friends, isn’t it?—Virginia cast about as to what she could bring. Game has no attraction—we have plenty of that. Fish, on the contrary, is a rarity. Although our river is full, we seldom see fish at the cottage, excepting a very over-due variety that a man peddles round occasionally.
So she decided on fish—alas! And hastened into the first fishmonger’s she saw and ordered a dozen pairs of soles. She maintains that wasn’t what she meant to ask for. It was oysters she wanted to bestow on me, and she went in with the definite intention of purchasing a dozen oysters. At that moment, however, her mind was somewhat pre-occupied with a scientific invention she was thinking out, whereby no woman need ever again handle a broom or carpet-sweeper or anything of that kind.
It was a simple device, consisting of a vacuum between the layers of leather on the bottom of the shoe, and some sort of a suction arrangement whereby you drew up the dust from the carpet (or wherever you walked) just by stepping on it. You would clear as you go, and instead of a person trailing dirt up and down the stairs by walking straight in from the garden and up to the top attic, they would really be giving the stair carpet what would be equal to a good brushing.
Moreover, not only would spring cleaning be banished for ever—when her invention was perfected—but your shoes would never more need mending. The dust collected in the shoe, being subject to so many cubic inches of pressure due to the person standing on top of the shoe, would become so compressed and self-adhesive as to offer a direct resistance to the friction set up between boot and alien matter trodden upon, equal to the inverse ratio of—I haven’t the faintest notion what! But I dare say you can follow her line of argument. She herself says she is always lucid and concise.
At any rate, I remember she said that it was terribly hard to be the mother of a huge family of boys, who not only trailed dust and dirt into the house at all times and seasons, but also wore out innumerable pairs of boots into the bargain. Whereupon I reminded her that neither of us need worry personally about that just yet!
She agreed, but said that did not alter her desire to benefit her day and generation, and to rid the world of “the Burden of the Broom.” And she was meditating on this, and thinking of all the leather we had wasted by letting it wear off the bottoms of our boots, when she saw the fish shop, and though she thought a dozen “oysters,” what she said was a dozen “pairs of soles”—and, of course, I would recognise that the mistake wasn’t her fault; it was entirely due to the psychological action of the subconscious something that connected soles with boots, etc.
Anyhow, the result was that she paid cheerfully for such a collection of fish as I hope I may never see again. And how happy that fishmonger must have been, when the transaction was completed, only those who got a whiff of the fish can estimate.
Virginia admitted that she thought the price seemed a lot for a dozen oysters (soles were two shillings a pound at the time), and the bag seemed heavy. Also, she confessed that it was a trifle more than she had intended to spend on a present for me at that moment, though she, being a real lady, would have been the last to mention it if I hadn’t. No, she hadn’t thought to look at what he put in; she merely told him to pack them up very securely, as she was going on a long railway journey. She didn’t know they were soles till she glanced at the bill in the train. She consoled me with the information that fish has the most wonderful phosphorescent properties, invaluable in the case of brain-fag; and she should see that I ate it all!
After a few miles of the journey the soles grew a little noisy in the rack. You don’t want to look a gift-horse in the mouth—truth to tell, I didn’t want to look at that particular gift at all. But I had to open both windows.