Mrs. Nosnibor, who had been keeping an ear on all that I had been saying, praised me when the lady had gone.  Nothing, she said, could have been more polite according to Erewhonian etiquette.  She then explained that to have stolen 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 enjoyment consequent upon what they call being “well.”  They admire mental health and love it in other people, and take all the pains they can (consistently with their other duties) to secure it for themselves.  They have an extreme dislike to marrying into what they consider unhealthy families.  They send for the straightener at once whenever they have been guilty of anything seriously flagitious—­often even if they think that they are on the point of committing it; and though his remedies are sometimes exceedingly painful, involving close confinement for weeks, and in some cases the most cruel physical tortures, I never heard of a reasonable Erewhonian refusing to do what his straightener told him, any more than of a reasonable Englishman refusing to undergo even the most frightful operation, if his doctors told him it was necessary.

We in England never shrink from telling our doctor what is the matter with us merely through the fear that he will hurt us.  We let him do his worst upon us, and stand it without a murmur, because we are not scouted for being ill, and because we know that the doctor is doing his best to cure us, and that he can judge of our case better than we can; but we should conceal all illness if we were treated as the Erewhonians are when they have anything the matter with them; we should do the same as with moral and intellectual diseases,—­we should feign health with the most consummate art, till we were found out, and should hate a single flogging given in the way of mere punishment more than the amputation of a limb, if it were kindly and courteously performed from a wish to help us out of our difficulty, and with the full consciousness on the part of the doctor that it was only by an accident of constitution that he was not in the like plight himself.  So the Erewhonians take a flogging once a week, and a diet of bread and water for two or three months together, whenever their straightener recommends it.

I do not suppose that even my host, on having swindled a confiding widow out of the whole of her property, was put to more actual suffering than a man will readily undergo at the hands of an English doctor.  And yet he must have had a very bad time of it.  The sounds I heard were sufficient to show that his pain was exquisite, but he never shrank from undergoing it.  He was quite sure that it did him good; and I think he was right.  I cannot believe that that man will ever embezzle money again.  He may—­but it will be a long time before he does so.