ie awake
thinking. And all the while the brown roses with their blue buds have
unconsciously stretched their tendrils to seize your wandering regard.
Before you realise what they are doing, your eyes are riveted on that
horrible bunch half-way up the wall which being cut in half by the sudden
termination of the width of one paper roll, does not exactly fit the
corresponding half of the other. How it suddenly begins to irritate
you--this break in the symmetry of the design! You force your eyes from
contemplating its offence, only to discover that the bunches of roses
which are exposed between the sides of the picture representing "The
Soul's Awakening" and the illuminated text painted by your hostess when
she was young, make _an exact square_. Above the pictures you perceive
that these same bunches form a "diamond," resting on one of its right
angles! That there are only five of these terrible bunches between the
side of "The Soul's Awakening" and the corner of the wall, and _six_
between that of "Trust in the Lord" and the door. And all the time you
are becoming more and more irritable. You cannot close your eyes because
you know that when you open them again the same illustrations from Euclid
will await you. The only thing that comforts you is the determination to
write immediately to your Member of Parliament insisting that he drafts a
Bill creating a censor of wallpapers, with dire penalties for any
"circumventors" of the law. That at least would put every seaside
landlady in prison.

_Our Irritating Habits_

Far more than the Big Things are the Teeny Weeny Little Ones which more
quickly divide lovers. A woman may conveniently overlook the fact that
her husband poisoned his first wife in order to marry her, when she
cannot ignore the perpetual example which he gives her of the truth that
Satan finds some evil still for idle hands to do--by always picking his
teeth. All of us possess some little irritating personal habit, which
makes for us more enemies than those faults for which, on our knees, we
beg forgiveness of Heaven. A woman can drink in the poetry of her
lover's passionate eloquence for ever and ever, amen. But if, in the
middle of the night, she wakes up to find her eloquent lover letting
forth the most stentorian snores she, metaphorically, immediately sits up
in bed and begins seriously _to wonder_. And the moment love begins to
ask itself questions, it is, as it were, turning over the