over my shoulder to see
if I could catch sight of the glimmer of skin through the heel of the
stocking. The fog was too thick for that.

Another half-mile and I put my finger down to my heel and felt the wet
blood through a large hole in my stocking, so I took off the shoes and
tied them together ... and, more silent than ever in the tomb of fog,
padded along as God had first supposed that woman would walk, on the wet
surface of the road.

A warded M.O. is pathetic. He knows he can't get well quicker than time
will let him. He has no faith.

To-morrow I have to take down all the decorations that I put up for
Christmas. When I put them up I never thought I should be the one to
take them down. When I was born no one thought I should be old.

While I was untying a piece of holly from the electric-light cords on
the ceiling and a patient was holding the ladder for me, a young _padre_
came and pretended to help us, but while he stood with us he whispered
to the patient, "Are you a communicant?" I felt a wave of heat and
anger; I could have dropped the holly on him.

They hung up their stockings on Christmas night on walking-sticks
hitched over the ends of the beds and under the mattresses. Such big
stockings! Many of them must have played Father Christmas in their own
homes, to their own children, on other Christmases.

On Christmas Eve I didn't leave the hospital till long after the
Day-Sisters had gone and the Night-Sisters came on. The wards were all
quiet as I walked down the corridor, and to left and right through the
glass doors hung the rows of expectant stockings.

Final and despairing postscript on Mr. Pettitt.

When a woman says she cannot come to lunch it is because she doesn't
want to.

Let this serve as an axiom to every lover: A woman who refuses lunch
refuses everything.

The hospital is alive; I feel it like a living being.

The hospital is like a dream. I am afraid of waking up and finding it
commonplace.

The white Sisters, the ceaselessly-changing patients, the long passages,
the sudden plunges into the brilliant wards ... their scenery hypnotizes
me.

Sometimes in the late evening one walks busily up and down the ward
doing this and that, forgetting that there is anything beyond the drawn
blinds, engrossed in the patients, one's tasks--bed-making, washing, one
errand and another--and then suddenly a blind will blow out and almost
up to the ceiling, and through it you will catch a