The Trouble of Life - Page 2

hard, and dropping
things about: here a vest and there a collar, and sowing a bitter
harvest against the morning. Or he sits on the edge of the bed jerking
his garments this way and that. "I shot a slipper in the air," as the
poet sings, and in the morning it turns up in the most impossible
quarters, and where you least expect it. And, talking of going to bed,
before Euphemia took the responsibility over, I was always forgetting to
wind my watch. But now that is one of the things she neglects.

Then, after getting up, there is breakfast. Autolycus of the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ may find heaven there, but I am differently constituted. There
is, to begin with the essence of the offence--the stuff that has to be
eaten somehow. Then there is the paper. Unless it is the face of a
fashionable beauty, I know of nothing more absolutely uninteresting than
a morning paper. You always expect to find something in it, and never
do. It wastes half my morning sometimes, going over and over the thing,
and trying to find out why they publish it. If I edited a daily I think
I should do like my father does when he writes to me. "Things much the
same," he writes; "the usual fussing about the curate's red socks"--a
long letter for him. The rest margin. And, by the bye, there are letters
every morning at breakfast, too!

Now I do not grumble at letters. You can read them instead of getting on
with your breakfast. They are entertaining in a way, and you can tear
them up at the end, and in that respect at least they are better than
people who come to see you. Usually, too, you need not make a reply. But
sometimes Euphemia gets hold of some still untorn, and says in her
dictatorial way that they _have_ to be answered--insists--says I _must_.
Yet she knows that nothing fills me with a livelier horror than having
to answer letters. It paralyses me. I waste whole days sometimes
mourning over the time that I shall have to throw away presently,
answering some needless impertinence--requests for me to return books
lent to me; reminders from the London Library that my subscription is
overdue; proposals for me to renew my ticket at the stores--Euphemia's
business really; invitations for me to go and be abashed before
impertinent distinguished people: all kinds of bothering things.

And speaking of letters and invitations brings me round to friends. I
dislike most people; in London they get in one's way in the street and
fill up railway carriages, and in the country they stare at you--but I
_hate_ my friends. Yet Euphemia says I _must_ "keep up" my friends. They
would be all very well if they were really true friends and respected my
feelings and left me alone, just to sit quiet. But they come wearing