From the high price of sugar we naturally floated on to the ruinous tendencies of butcher’s meat, and Mrs. Brash explained the trouble she had with her butcher because he wouldn’t send home all the bones.
Mrs. Ridley had similar harrowments to relate about her butcher, but his vice took the form of sticking to the trimmings from the joints, which she was sure he sold at a good price for soap-making, now that fat was so scarce and soap likely to be dear. She knew it because—as she reminded us—she was the treasurer of the “Women’s League for Encouraging the Troops to Wash,” and it came very hard on their funds. What it would cost them for the cakes of soap they were going to send out no one would believe! (No, they hadn’t sent any yet; but of course they were going to, when they got enough members, and, by the way, would I join?)
She didn’t mind a fair charge, of course (we all murmured agreement). War was war, and we must expect to pay something extra to help the King keep going; he had his family to provide for like any other man. Neither did she grudge one solitary penny that went to Lord Kitchener (hearty applause). No, indeed! But what made her blood boil was to feel that she was actually washing her hands with her own ribs—and at one-and-threepence-halfpenny a pound, too!
Virginia suggested she should try a rather less heating soap; but she was drowned by Miss Thresher, who said firmly, “Borax; that’s what you ought to send to the troops. Not only would it soften the water for them, poor things—and no one knows better than I do what awfully hard stuff that German water is; nearly scraped my skin off when I went up the Rhine two years ago—but they would find it so useful to put in with their woollen things that we’ve been knitting them, to keep out the moth.”
My reminder that our troops were not as yet, alas! drawing their water from German cisterns was unnoticed; for the mere mention of moth produced extraordinary animation. Was borax good? Weren’t they a perfect nuisance? and so on. I said I always put it in with my furs, and never had a moth near them.
“I wonder if that’s what they put with Queen Mary’s furs,” said Mrs. Brash. “I never saw more lovely sables than those she had on when she came to the hospital yesterday.”
Miss Thresher verified this last statement, absolutely superb they were, and Miss Thresher had a right to speak, for the Queen had bowed straight at her, as she stood on the kerb, “as near to her as I am to you.”
Miss Quirker said that for her part she didn’t think there was another woman in the world so gracious as Queen Mary—except of course Queen Alexandra. She would bow to anyone she saw, no matter how shabby they were.
Mrs. Brash hurriedly said what she so much admired in Queen Alexandra was her figure.
Miss Quirker continued, “Yes, and speaking of corsets I want to tell you of another economy besides doing without sugar to help the nation. You should buy your corsets several sizes larger than usual, and then when they are getting worn, you can turn them upside down and wear them the other way up. It’s so saving.”