I hate spiders!  Nearly everybody has a pet aversion of some sort.  I have heard people shriek at the sight of a caterpillar, and turn pale in the neighborhood of a toad.  My great antipathy is a spider!  Not that I object to its treatment of flies—­nasty little worries, they deserve everything that happens to them.  But it is the appearance of a spider that is so against it.  There is a shifty expression about the eye, and such a leer on the upper lip.  Money spinners are not so objectionable.  I can tolerate them.  It is the big, almost tarantulas, from which I flee.  Those creatures which start up suddenly, and run across the room close by where you are sitting; creatures so large that you can almost hear their footsteps as they pass.

A man told me once he had found a spider in his room of such enormous dimensions that he had to open the door in order that it might get out!

Overdrawn, you say?  Well, it sounds a little improbable certainly; not so much on account of the unusual size of the spider as for the extraordinary consideration on the part of the man.

CHAPTER III.

On politics.

Perhaps you don’t think me competent to talk about politics?  “What do women know about such things?” asks the superior masculine mind.

Well, they don’t know so much as men, I admit, and I earnestly hope they never will.  A woman who is infected with politics is a positive pest, and should be removed at once.  If I do not know anything about them, at any rate I ought to, as I have been brought up in a raging Tory household, and so have been steeped in them from my youth up.

There is such a sameness in politicians.  Whatever their opinions, their language and feelings are all one.  They are only directed at different people.  While one man is gloating over a Conservative victory you hear a mutter from the Radical to the effect that “That brute has got in for ——­” Poor man, why, because he thinks differently to you, should he be a brute?  But just the same words are spoken if the positions be reversed.  It is only the mouths that change places.

I am afraid my views incline toward the Tory side.  I cannot help it, I was bought over long ago.  You must feel an interest as to the successful candidate when the result means either a tip all round or a thundery atmosphere for the rest of the day.  Men take an adverse poll as a personal affront and vent their feelings on their families.  The tipping was quite an understood thing when I was younger, now it is given up, and joy is shown in a less substantial way, I regret to say.  Unfortunately the thunder storms are not events of the past as well.