I do not wish to disparage my own “side” by the foregoing remarks, not caring in any way to emulate Balaam.  It is not only the members of the Primrose League who are so anxious to praise each other.  It is the case at nearly every meeting you go to.  It is a weakness of human nature.  We know that if we laud our friend he will sing an eulogy on us the next minute, so it is only natural we should do it, after all.

    “The fault is not in our stars,
    But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

CHAPTER IV.

ON AFTERNOON TEA.

    “The Muses’ friend, Tea, does our fancy aid,
    Repress the vapors which the head invade,
    And keeps the palace of the soul serene.”

How I do love tea!  I don’t deny it, it is as necessary to me as smoking is to men.

I have heard a lady accused by her doctor of being a “tea-drunkard”!  “Tea picks you up for a little time,” he said, “and you feel a great deal better after you have had a cup.  But it is a stimulant, the effect of which does not last very long, and all the while it is ruining your nerves and constitution.  I daresay it is difficult to give up—­the poor man finds the same with his spirits.  You are no better than he!”

It is rather a come down, is it not?  Somehow, when you are drinking tea, you feel so very temperate.  Well, at least, the above reflection makes you sympathize with the inebriates, if it does nothing else; and I am afraid it does nothing else with me.  In spite of the warning, I continue to take my favorite beverage as strong and as frequently as ever, and so I suppose must look forward to a cranky nervous old age.

It is curious to notice how men are invading our precincts now-a-days.  They used to scoff at such a meal as afternoon tea, and now most of them take it as regularly as they stream out of the trains on Saturday afternoons with pink papers under their arms—­such elevating literature!  Indeed there is quite a fuss if they have to go without it—­the tea I mean, not the paper.

It is strange too, because they dislike it so, if we trespass on their preserves, e.g., their outcry on ladies smoking:  which is exceedingly unfair, for we have no equivalent for the fragrant weed.  Still I agree with the men in a way, for nothing looks worse than a girl smoking in public, though a cigarette now and then with a brother does, I think, no harm, provided it does not grow into a habit.

My brother once gave me a cigarette and bet me a shilling that I would not smoke it through.  It was so hard that if I had bent it, it would have snapped in two.  He had only just found it in a corner of a cupboard where it had lain for years and years.  But oh, the strength of that cigarette!  It took me hours to get through, for it would not draw a bit.  Nevertheless, with the incentive of a shilling to urge me on, I continued “faint but pursuing” and eventually won the bet.  I would not do it again for ten times the amount.