little dark girl worked the panel up an inch with her nails
and cajoled through the crack.

I have said before that the long corridor is wonderful. In the winter
afternoons and evenings, when the mist rolled up and down over the tiles
like the smoke in a tunnel, when one walked almost in darkness and
peered into the then forbidden wards, when dwarfs coming from the G
block grew larger and larger till the A block turned them into beings of
one's own size, the corridor always made a special impression on me.

But in the summer mornings it is remarkable too. Then regiments of
charwomen occupy it, working in close mass formation. Seven will work
abreast upon their knees, flanked by their pails, their hands moving
backwards and forwards in so complicated a system that there appears to
be no system at all.

Patches of the corridor are thick with soapsuds; patches are dry. The
art of walking the corridor in the morning can be learnt, and for a year
and five months I have done it with no more than a slip and a slide.

But yesterday I stepped on a charwoman's hand. It was worse than
stepping on a puppy: one knows that sickening lift of the heart, as
though the will could undo the weight of the foot....

The stagger, the sense of one's unpardonable heaviness.... I slipped on
her hand as on a piece of orange-peel, and, jumping like a chamois, sent
the next pail all over the heels of the front rank.

It was the sort of situation with which one can do nothing.

I met a friend yesterday, one of the old Chelsea people. He has followed
his natural development. Although he talks war, war, war, it is from his
old angle, it wears the old hall-mark.

He belongs to a movement which believes it "feels the war." Personal
injury or personal loss does not enter the question; the heart of this
movement of his bleeds perpetually, but impersonally. He claims for it
that this heart is able to bleed more profusely than any other heart,
individual or collective, in ... let us limit it to England!

In fact it is the only blood he has noticed.

When the taxes go up he says, "Well, now perhaps it will make people
feel the war!" For he longs that every one should lose their money so
that at last they may "feel the war," "stop the war" (interchangeable!)

He forgets that even in England a great many quite stupid people would
rather lose their money than their sons.

How strange that these people should still picture the minds of soldiers
a