the love of decoration is not woman's alone. Through the dispensary
hatchway I saw three empty poison-bottles, each with a poppy stuck in
its neck.

Everything in the dispensary is beautiful--its glasses, its flames, its
brass weights, its jars and globes; but much more beautiful because it
is half a floor higher than the corridor in which we stand and look up
into it, through a hatchway in the wall. There is something in that: one
feels like Gulliver.

No woman has ever been into this bachelors' temple.

On tapping at a small square panel set in the wall of the corridor the
panel flies up and a bachelor is seen from the waist to the knees. If he
feels well and my smile is humble he will stoop, and I see looking down
at me a small worn face and bushy eyebrows, or a long ascetic face and
bleached hair, or a beard and a pair of bearded nostrils.

Between them the three old things, priests in their way, measure and
weigh and mix and scold and let up the panel and bang it down through
the long day, filling the hospital with their coloured bottles, sealed
packets of pills, jars and vaccines, and precious syringes in boxes
marked "To be returned at once" (I never knew a Sister fail to toss her
head when she saw this message).

It is a very social spot outside the panel of the dispensary: each
V.A.D. goes there each morning as one might do one's marketing, and,
meeting there, puts down her straw basket, taps at the panel, and
listens to the scolding of the old men with only half an ear.

For the bachelors amuse themselves when they are not mixing and weighing
by inventing odd rules and codes of their own, and, reaching a skinny
arm through the hatchway, they pin them on, little scraps of paper which
fall down and are swept to heaven in the charwomen's pails.

And the V.A.D.'s, who are not at all afraid, because one cannot be
afraid of a man of whom one has never seen more than half, turn a blind
eye to the slips and a deaf ear to the voices, bringing their bottles
and their jars just in the manner they were taught to do when first they
entered the hospital. And they gossip! They have just seen the morning
papers on all the beds; they have just heard about the half-days for the
week; they have collected little rags and ends of news as they came
along the corridor.

They gossip. And once a bearded bachelor thumped the panel down almost
on my finger, leaving three startled faces staring at a piece of painted
wood. But a