..

As she sat there, unfolding to me the fogs of her situation, her fresh
pink face clouded, her grand cap and red cape adding burdens of
authority to the toil of growth, I could readily have looked into the
glass to see if my hair was grey!

"Then there is nothing you condemn?" said the youngest Sister finally,
at the close of a conversation.

I have to-day come up against the bedrock of her integrity; it is
terrible. She has eternal youth, eternal fair hair, cold and ignorant
judgments. On things relating to the world I can't further soften her; a
man must do the rest.

"A gentleman ... a gentleman...." I am so tired of this cry for a
"gentleman."

Why can't they do very well with what they've got!

Here in the wards the Sisters have the stuff the world is made of laid
out, bedded, before their eyes; the ups and downs of man from the four
corners of the Empire and the hundred corners of social life, helpless
and in pyjamas--and they're not satisfied, but must cry for a
"gentleman"!

"I couldn't make a friend of that man!" the youngest Sister loves to add
to her criticism of a patient.

It isn't my part as a V.A.D. to cry, "Who wants you to?"

"I couldn't trust that man!" the youngest Sister will say equally often.

This goes deeper....

But whom need one trust? Brother, lover, friend ... no more. Why wish to
trust all the world?...

"They are not real men," she says, "not men through and through."

That's where she goes wrong; they are men through and through--patchy,
ordinary, human. She means they are not men after her pattern.

Something will happen in the ward. Once I have touched this bedrock in
her I shall be for ever touching it till it gets sore!

One should seek for no response. They are not elastic, these nuns....

In all honesty the hospital is a convent, and the men in it my brothers.

This for months on end....

For all that, now and then some one raises his eyes and looks at me; one
day follows another and the glance deepens.

"Charme de l'amour qui pourrait vous peindre!"

Women are left behind when one goes into hospital. Such women as are in
a hospital should be cool, gentle; anything else becomes a torment to
the "prisoner."

For me, too, it is bad; it brings the world back into my eyes; duties
are neglected, discomforts unobserved.

But there are things one doesn't fight.

"Charme de l'amour...." The ward is changed! The eldest Sister and the
youngest Sister are