n the
street on a muddy day to be half-smothered by it. It all comes of being
so attractive, as the old lady said when she was struck by lightning.
Other people can go out on dirty days and walk about for hours without
getting a speck upon themselves; while if I go across the road I come
back a perfect disgrace to be seen (as in my boyish days my poor dear
mother tried often to tell me). If there were only one dab of mud to be
found in the whole of London, I am convinced I should carry it off from
all competitors.

I wish I could return the affection, but I fear I never shall be able
to. I have a horror of what they call the "London particular." I feel
miserable and muggy all through a dirty day, and it is quite a relief
to pull one's clothes off and get into bed, out of the way of it all.
Everything goes wrong in wet weather. I don't know how it is, but there
always seem to me to be more people, and dogs, and perambulators, and
cabs, and carts about in wet weather than at any other time, and they
all get in your way more, and everybody is so disagreeable--except
myself--and it does make me so wild. And then, too, somehow I always
find myself carrying more things in wet weather than in dry; and when
you have a bag, and three parcels, and a newspaper, and it suddenly
comes on to rain, you can't open your umbrella.

Which reminds me of another phase of the weather that I can't bear, and
that is April weather (so called because it always comes in May).
Poets think it very nice. As it does not know its own mind five minutes
together, they liken it to a woman; and it is supposed to be very
charming on that account. I don't appreciate it, myself. Such
lightning-change business may be all very agreeable in a girl. It is no
doubt highly delightful to have to do with a person who grins one moment
about nothing at all, and snivels the next for precisely the same cause,
and who then giggles, and then sulks, and who is rude, and affectionate,
and bad-tempered, and jolly, and boisterous, and silent, and passionate,
and cold, and stand-offish, and flopping, all in one minute (mind,
I don't say this. It is those poets. And they are supposed to
be connoisseurs of this sort of thing); but in the weather the
disadvantages of the system are more apparent. A woman's tears do not
make one wet, but the rain does; and her coldness does not lay the
foundations of asthma and rheumatism, as the east wind is apt to. I
can prepare for and put up