And then the blow fell. Suddenly U.A. became omnipresent. I met a friend who only last week I had found doing himself with his customary thoroughness at dinner. This evening he was dining again, but his sole companion was a chilly and depressing bottle of French natural water.
"What is this?" I asked. "War economy?"
"No," he said; "merely U.A."
I should have thought little of that were it not that half-an-hour later I overheard two men talking about the difficulty of getting rid of U.A. once it had established itself.
Another man, to whom I complained of some trifling discomfort, said it was probably U.A.
An hour later I was sitting at a farce which, like all the farces in London at the present moment, is the funniest thing ever staged—only this, if the management is to be believed, is more so; and the only thing I was able to laugh at was a joke about U.A.
The next morning I received a letter from a solicitous relation warning me to be more careful or I should be at the mercy of U.A.
And to crown all I went to see a doctor about something really quite negligible, and, after beginning by conjecturing that it was due to U.A., he ended by feeling certain of it.
He asked me a hundred questions about myself, and after every reply he said either, "That's U.A.," or "U.A. again."
"Almost everything that is wrong with people," he said finally, "is caused by U.A."