These are just sample bothers—­shaving, washing, answering letters, talking to people.  I could specify hundreds more.  Indeed, in my sadder moments, it seems to me life is all compact of bothers.  There are the details of business—­knowing the date approximately (an incessant anxiety) and the time of day.  Then, having to buy things.  Euphemia does most of this, it is true, but she draws the line at my boots and gloves and hosiery and tailoring.  Then, doing up parcels and finding pieces of string or envelopes or stamps—­which Euphemia might very well manage for me.  Then, finding your way back after a quiet, thoughtful walk.  Then, having to get matches for your pipe.  I sometimes dream of a better world, where pipe, pouch, and matches all keep together instead of being mutually negatory.  But Euphemia is always putting everything into some hiding-hole or other, which she calls its “place.”  Trivial things in their way, you may say, yet each levying so much toll on my brain and nervous system, and demanding incessant vigilance and activity.  I calculated once that I wasted a masterpiece upon these mountainous little things about every three months of my life.  Can I help thinking of them, then, and asking why I suffer thus?  And can I avoid seeing at last how it is they hang together?

For there is still one other bother, a kind of bother botherum, to tell of, though I hesitate at the telling.  It brings this rabble herd of worries into line and makes them formidable; it is, so to speak, the Bother Commander-in-Chief.  Well!  Euphemia.  I simply worship the ground she treads upon, mind, but at the same time the truth is the truth.  Euphemia is a bother.  She is a brave little woman, and helps me in every conceivable way.  But I wish she would not.  It is so obviously all her doing.  She makes me get up of a morning—­I would not stand as much from anybody else—­and keeps a sharp eye on my chin and collar.  If it were not for her I could sit about always with no collar or tie on in that old jacket she gave to the tramp, and just smoke and grow a beard and let all the bothers slide.  I would never wash, never shave, never answer any letters, never go to see any friends, never do any work—­except, perhaps, an insulting postcard to a publisher now and again.  I would just sit about.

Sometimes I think this may be peculiar in me.  At other times I fancy I am giving voice to the secret feeling of every member of my sex.  I suspect, then, that we would all do as the noble savage does, take our things off and lie about comfortable, if only someone had the courage to begin.  It is these women—­all love and reverence to Euphemia notwithstanding—­who make us work and bother us with Things.  They keep us decent, and remind us we have a position to support.  And really, after all, this is not my original discovery!  There is the third chapter of Genesis, for instance.  And then who has not read Carlyle’s gloating over a certain historical suit of leather?  It gives me a queer thrill of envy, that Quaker Fox and his suit of leather.  Conceive it, if you can!  One would never have to quail under the scrutiny of a tailor any more.  Thoreau, too, come to think of it, was, by way of being a prophet, a pioneer in this Emancipation of Man from Bothery.