horror of being unwashed. It is a sort of cant. I can understand a
sponge bath being a novelty the first time and exhilarating the second
and third. But day after day, week after week, month after month, and
nothing to show at the end of it all! Then there is shaving. I have to
get shaved because Euphemia hates me with a blue jowl, and I will admit
I hate myself. Yet, if I were left alone, I do not think my personal
taste would affect my decision; I will say that for myself. Either I
hack about with a blunt razor--my razors are always blunt--until I am a
kind of Whitechapel Horror, and with hair in tufts upon my chin like the
top of a Bosjesman's head, or else I have to spend all the morning being
dabbed about the face by a barber with damp hands. In either case it is
a repulsive thing to have, eating into one's time when one might be
living; and I have calculated that all the hair I have lost in this way,
put end to end, would reach to Berlin. All that vital energy thrown
away! However, "Thorns and bristles shall it bring forth to thee." I
suppose it is part of the primal curse, and I try and stand it like a
man. But the thing is a bother all the same.

Then after shaving comes the hunt for the collar-stud. Of all idiotic
inventions the modern collar is the worst. A man who has to write things
for such readers as mine cannot think over-night of where he puts his
collar-stud; he has to keep his mind at an altogether higher level.
Consequently he walks about the bedroom, thinking hard, and dropping
things about: here a vest and there a collar, and sowing a bitter
harvest against the morning. Or he sits on the edge of the bed jerking
his garments this way and that. "I shot a slipper in the air," as the
poet sings, and in the morning it turns up in the most impossible
quarters, and where you least expect it. And, talking of going to bed,
before Euphemia took the responsibility over, I was always forgetting to
wind my watch. But now that is one of the things she neglects.