What to do with her I do not know.  A League, after all, seems ineffectual; she would break up any League.  I have thought of giving her in charge for assault, but I shrink from the invidious publicity of that.  Still, I am in grim earnest to do something.  I think at times that the compulsory adoption of a narrow doorway for churches and places of public entertainment might be some protection for quiet, inoffensive people.  How she would rage outside to be sure!  Yet that seems a great undertaking.

But this little paper is not so much a plan of campaign as a preliminary defiance.  Life is a doubtful boon while one is never safe from assault, from hitting and shoving, from poking with umbrellas, being sat upon, and used as a target for projectile nephews and nieces.  I warn her—­possibly with a certain quaver in my voice—­that I am in revolt.  If she hits me again——­I will not say the precise thing I will do, but I warn her, very solemnly and deliberately, that she had better not hit me again.

And so for the present the matter remains.

THE SHOPMAN

If I were really opulent, I would not go into a shop at all—­I would have a private secretary.  If I were really determined, Euphemia would do these things.  As it is, I find buying things in a shop the most exasperating of all the many trying duties of life.  I am sometimes almost tempted to declare myself Adamite to escape it.  The way the shopman eyes you as you enter his den, the very spread of his fingers, irritate me.  “What can I have the pleasure?” he says, bowing forward at me, and with his eye on my chin—­and so waits.

Now I hate incomplete sentences, and confound his pleasure!  I don’t go into a shop to give a shopman pleasure.  But your ordinary shopman must needs pretend you delight and amuse him.  I say, trying to display my dislike as plainly as possible, “Gloves.”  “Gloves, yessir,” he says.  Why should he?  I suppose he thinks I require to be confirmed in my persuasion that I want gloves.  “Calf—­kid—­dogskin?” How should I know the technicalities of his traffic?  “Ordinary gloves,” I say, disdaining his petty distinctions.  “About what price, sir?” he asks.

Now that always maddens me.  Why should I be expected to know the price of gloves?  I’m not a commercial traveller nor a wholesale dealer, and I don’t look like one.  Neither am I constitutionally parsimonious nor petty.  I am a literary man, unworldly, and I wear long hair and a soft hat and a peculiar overcoat to indicate the same to ordinary people.  Why, I say, should I know the price of gloves?  I know they are some ordinary price—­elevenpence-halfpenny, or three-and-six, or seven-and-six, or something—­one of those prices that everything is sold at—­but further I don’t go.  Perhaps I say elevenpence-halfpenny at a venture.

His face lights up with quiet malice.  “Don’t keep them, sir,” he says.  I can tell by his expression that I am ridiculously low, and so being snubbed.  I think of trying with three-and-six, or seven-and-six; the only other probable prices for things that I know, except a guinea and five pounds.  Then I see the absurdity of the business, and my anger comes surging up.