takes it out and lays it down. This
is a crude way of doing things, a woman displays more subtlety. Say she
is standing in the street, and wants fourpence to pay for a bunch of
violets she has purchased from a flower-girl. She has two parcels in one
hand, and a parasol in the other. With the remaining two fingers of the
left hand she secures the violets. The question then arises, how to
pay the girl? She flutters for a few minutes, evidently not quite
understanding why it is she cannot do it. The reason then occurs to her:
she has only two hands and both these are occupied. First she thinks
she will put the parcels and the flowers into her right hand, then she
thinks she will put the parasol into her left. Then she looks round
for a table or even a chair, but there is not such a thing in the whole
street. Her difficulty is solved by her dropping the parcels and the
flowers. The girl picks them up for her and holds them. This enables
her to feel for her pocket with her right hand, while waving her open
parasol about with her left. She knocks an old gentleman's hat off into
the gutter, and nearly blinds the flower-girl before it occurs to her to
close it. This done, she leans it up against the flower-girl's basket,
and sets to work in earnest with both hands. She seizes herself firmly
by the back, and turns the upper part of her body round till her hair is
in front and her eyes behind. Still holding herself firmly with her
left hand--did she let herself go, goodness knows where she would spin
to;--with her right she prospects herself. The purse is there, she can
feel it, the problem is how to get at it. The quickest way would, of
course, be to take off the skirt, sit down on the kerb, turn it inside
out, and work from the bottom of the pocket upwards. But this simple
idea never seems to occur to her. There are some thirty folds at the
back of the dress, between two of these folds commences the secret
passage. At last, purely by chance, she suddenly discovers it, nearly
upsetting herself in the process, and the purse is brought up to the
surface. The difficulty of opening it still remains. She knows it opens
with a spring, but the secret of that spring she has never mastered, and
she never will. Her plan is to worry it generally until it does open.
Five minutes will always do it, provided she is not flustered.

At last it does open. It would be incorrect to say that she opens it. It
opens because it is sick of being mauled