.

Creatures of habit! All the coloured dressing-gowns range themselves
round the two long tables--this man in this seat, that man by the
gas-fire; this man with his wheel-chair drawn up at the end, that man at
the corner where no one will jostle his arm.

Curious how these officers leave the hospital, so silently.
Disappearances.... One face after another slips out of the picture, the
unknown heart behind the face fixed intently on some other centre of
life.

I went into a soldiers' ward to-night to inquire about a man who has
pneumonia.

Round his bed there stood three red screens, and the busy, white-capped
heads of two Sisters bobbed above the rampart.

It suddenly shocked me. What were they doing there? Why the screens? Why
the look of strain in the eyes of the man in the next bed who could see
behind the screens?

I went cold and stood rooted, waiting till one of them could come out
and speak to me.

Soon they took away the screen nearest to me; they had done with it.

The man I was to inquire for has no nostrils; they were blown away, and
he breathes through two pieces of red rubber tubing: it gave a more
horrible look to his face than I have ever seen.

The Sister came out and told me she thought he was "not up to much." I
think she means he is dying.

I wonder if he thinks it better to die.... But he was nearly well before
he got pneumonia, had begun to take up the little habits of living. He
had been out to tea.

Inexplicable, what he thinks of, lying behind the screen.

To-night I was laying my trays in the corridor, the dim corridor that I
am likely often to mention--the occasional blue gas-lamps hanging at
intervals down the roof in a dwindling perspective.

The only unshaded light in the corridor hangs above my head, making the
cutlery gleam in my hands.

The swish-swish of a lame foot approached down the stone tiling with the
tapping, soft and dull, of a rubber-tipped walking-stick.

He paused by the pillar, as I knew he would, and I busied myself with an
added rush and hurry, an added irritating noise of spoons flung down.

He waited patiently, shyly. I didn't look up, but I knew his face was
half smiling and suppliant.

"We shall miss you," he said.

"But I shall be back in a week!"

"We shall miss you ... laying the trays out here."

"Everything passes," I said gaily.

He whistled a little and balanced himself against his stick.

"You are like me, Sister," he said earnest