Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl | Page 6

be found mixed up in any such transactions. We are so foolish, we have such little minds, we try to hide our doings from our neighbors, who are all going through the same experiences, and are equally desirous of concealing them from us. If all our screens were taken away what a comedy of errors would be disclosed. How surprised we should be to see everyone committing follies of which we have been so ashamed and so anxious to hide from the eyes of all!
After all the brandy had a most beneficial effect. I think it must have flown to her head; for never before had she given such large amounts. I was quite sorry to find her so well at her next advent. Her sniff was even more eloquent, and her prices had returned to their original low level. I regret now that I did not again try the brandy.
Another woman I employed was even uglier than the first. She was so wholesomely ugly. A great red full moon represented her countenance, radiant with the color of the Eiffel Tower. She was altogether a more satisfactory chancellor than the other. She always insisted on your stating your own price to begin with. "Well, what d'yer think yerself, mum?" was her invariable ejaculation, and then, hearing your reply, would break in on whatever you said by "It ain't worth more than _'arf_ that to me, mum," in the most aggrieved voice. I became used to her in time, and knowing she would halve whatever I said, used to demand double the worth of the thing. "What d'yer think yerself, mum?" You grow so tired of your opinion being thus asked. I wonder how many times she says it in a day! It is a cautious way of going about it, at any rate. If that woman ever appeared in a police court on a charge of dishonesty, and the magistrate asked her what she had to say to the charge, the answer would undoubtedly be, "Well, what d'yer think yerself, sir?"
Some of those bills are still unpaid. Quarter day is coming round again, so I expect there will be some more soon. Alas! I am an unlucky being, born under an unlucky star.
You may think it a strange notion, but I attribute all my ill-luck to spiders:
"If you wish to live and thrive, Let a spider run alive."
I am not superstitious as a rule, but I cannot help thinking that my wholesale massacre of this obnoxious insect has something to do with my misfortunes by way of retribution.
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.
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