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 shiny clothes, and mop and mow at me and expect me to answer their gibberings.  Polite conversation always appears to me to be a wicked perversion of the blessed gift of speech, which, I take it, was given us to season our lives rather than to make them insipid.  New friends are the worst in this respect.  With old friends one is more at home; you give them something to eat or drink, or look at, or something—­whatever they seem to want—­and just turn round and go on smoking quietly.  But every now and then Euphemia or Destiny inflicts a new human being upon me.  I do not mean a baby, though the sentence has got that turn somehow, but an introduction; and the wretched thing, all angles and offence, keeps bobbing about me and discovering new ways of worrying me, trying, I believe, to find out what topics interest me, though the fact is no topics interest me.  Once or twice, of course, I have met human beings I think I could have got on with very well, after a time; but in this mood, at least, I doubt if any human being is quite worth the bother of a new acquaintance.