Punch, or the London Charivari, page 9 by Various Authors
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ate secretaries and diplomats and high-up people like that. Even attachés carried them sometimes. The very lowest a man with an attaché-case could be was a First-Class Civil Servant; and one was justified in imagining confidential papers inside, or, at any rate, home-work of the first importance. But nowadays there are too many of them for that. The attaché-case has been degraded; it is universal. This might be because there is practically no male person alive just now who has not been an adjutant at one time or another, and pinched at least one attaché-case from the orderly-room. But most of the cases in the Tube are carried by females, so that theory is no good.
Well, then, I imagined sandwiches or knitting or powder-puffs or tea; but those also are rotten hypotheses. I have too much faith in the good sense of my fellow-countrywomen to believe that they would cart a horrible thing like a cheap attaché-case about simply in order to convey a sandwich or a powder-puff from one end of London to the other. So I had to fall back on my own experience.
I know, at any rate, what is inside mine. There are some rather grubby envelopes which I borrowed from the House of Commons, and some very grubby blotting-paper from the same source, and either a ream of foolscap or a quire of foolscap, whichever is which; some pipe-cleaners and a few pieces of milk-chocolate; and a letter from the Amalgamated Association of Fish-Friers which ought to have been answered a long time ago; and a memorandum on Hog-Importing which I am always going to read while waiting at the station; and a nice piece of thick string with which I have tied a bowline on a bight; and two broken pencils and some more envelopes; and a Parliamentary Whip of last year and a stationery bill of the year before; and several bills of my employer, not to mention a cheque for ninety-seven pounds which I suppose he would like me to send to the bank; and a great deal of fluff and a pipe or two and four or five stamped let