thrills for you here very easily."

The name of my ... admirer ... is, after all, Pettitt. The other nurse
in the Mess, who is very grand and insists on pronouncing his name in
the French way, says he is "of humble origin."

He seems to have no relations and no visitors.

Out in the corridor I meditate on love.

Laying trays soothes the activity of the body, and the mind works
softly.

I meditate on love. I say to myself that Mr. Pettitt is to be envied. I
am still the wonder of the unknown to him: I exist, walk, talk, every
day beneath the beam of his eye, impenetrable.

He fell down again yesterday, and his foot won't heal. He has time
before him.

But in a hospital one has never time, one is never sure. He has perhaps
been here long enough to learn that--to feel the insecurity, the
impermanency.

At any moment he may be forced to disappear into the secondary stage of
convalescent homes.

Yes, the impermanency of life in a hospital! An everlasting dislocation
of combinations.

Like nuns, one must learn to do with no nearer friend than God.

Bolts, in the shape of sudden, whimsical orders, are flung by an
Almighty whom one does not see.

The Sister who is over me, the only Sister who can laugh at things other
than jokes, is going in the first week of next month. Why? Where? She
doesn't know, but only smiles at my impatience. She knows life--hospital
life.

It unsettles me as I lay my spoons and forks. Sixty-five trays. It takes
an hour to do. Thirteen pieces on each tray. Thirteen times sixty-five
... eight hundred and forty-five things to collect, lay, square up
symmetrically. I make little absurd reflections and arrangements--taking
a dislike to the knives because they will not lie still on the polished
metal of the tray, but pivot on their shafts, and swing out at angles
after my fingers have left them.

I love the long, the dim and lonely, corridor; the light centred in the
gleam of the trays, salt-cellars, yellow butters, cylinders of glass....

Impermanency.... I don't wonder the Sisters grow so secret, so uneager.
How often stifled! How often torn apart!

It's heaven to me to be one of such a number of faces.

To see them pass into Mess like ghosts--gentleman, tinker, and tailor;
each having shuffled home from death; each having known his life rock on
its base ... not talking much--for what is there to say?--not laughing
much for they have been here too long--is a nightly pleasure to me