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story, and their familiarity with the long names assures him
that they thoroughly understand his case.
The reader will have no difficulty in believing that the
laws regarding ill health were frequently evaded by the
help of recognised fictions, which every one understood,
but which it would be considered gross ill-breeding to even
seem to understand. Thus, a day or two after my arrival
at the Nosnibors’, one of the many ladies who called on
me made excuses for her husband’s only sending his card,
on the ground that when going through the public mar-
ket- place that morning he had stolen a pair of socks. I had
already been warned that I should never show surprise, so I
merely expressed my sympathy, and said that though I had
only been in the capital so short a time, I had already had a
very narrow escape from stealing a clothes-brush, and that
though I had resisted temptation so far, I was sadly afraid
that if I saw any object of special interest that was neither
too hot nor too heavy, I should have to put myself in the
straightener’s hands.
Mrs. Nosnibor, who had been keeping an ear on all that I
had been saying, praised me when the lady had gone. Noth-
ing, she said, could have been more polite according to
Erewhonian etiquette. She then explained that to have sto-
len a pair of socks, or ‘to have the socks’ (in more colloquial
language), was a recognised way of saying that the person in
question was slightly indisposed.
In spite of all this they have a keen sense of the enjoy-
ment consequent upon what they call being ‘well.’ They
admire mental health and love it in other people, and take

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