I see for the first time grown women trying
with all the concentration of their fuller years to be as like one
another as it is possible to be.

There is a certain dreadful innocence about them too, as though each
would protest, "In spite of our tasks, our often immodest tasks, our
minds are white as snow."

And, as far as I can see, their conception of a white female mind is
the silliest, most mulish, incurious, unresponsive, condemning kind of
an ideal that a human creature could set before it.

At present I am so humble that I am content to do all the labour and
take none of the temperatures, but I can see very well that it is when I
reach a higher plane that all the trouble will begin.

The ranklings, the heart-burnings, the gross injustices.... Who is to
make the only poultice? Who is to paint the very septic throat of Mr.
Mullins, Army Service Corps? Who is to--dizzy splendour--go round with
the M.O. should the Sister be off for a half-day?

These and other questions will form the pride and anguish of my inner
life.

It is wonderful to go up to London and dine and stay the night with
Madeleine after the hospital.

The hospital--a sort of monotone, a place of whispers and wheels moving
on rubber tyres, long corridors, and strangely unsexed women moving in
them. Unsexed not in any real sense, but the white clothes, the hidden
hair, the stern white collar just below the chin, give them an air of
school-girlishness, an air and a look women don't wear in the world.
They seem unexpectant.

Then at Madeleine's ... the light, the talk, the deep bath got ready for
me by a maid, instead of my getting it ready for a patient....

Not that I mind getting it ready; I like it. Only the change! It's like
being turn and turn about maid and mistress.

There is the first snow here, scanty and frozen on the doorstep.

I came home last night in the dark to dinner and found its faint traces
on the road and in the gutter as I climbed the hill. I couldn't see
well; there were stars, but no moon. Higher up it was unmistakable; long
white tracks frozen in the dried mud of the road, and a branch under a
lamp thickened with frozen snow.

Shall I ever grow out of that excitement over the first bit of snow...?

I felt a glow of pride in the hill, thinking:

"In London it's all slush and mud. They don't suspect what we've got
here. A suburb is a wonderful place!"

After a wet and muddy day in London I've seen the trains p