finishes
undressing.

That is why one Sister said to me, "If I hadn't taken up nursing I
should have gone in for culture."

I don't laugh at that.... To have an intimate life one must have a
little time.

Who am I that I can step in from outside to criticize? The hospital is
not my life. I am expectant....

But for them here and now is the business of life.

As the weeks go by I recognize the difficulty of keeping the life of the
Sisters and the V.A.D.'s out of the circle of my thoughts. Their
vigorous and symmetrical vision of the ward attacks me; their attitude
towards the patients, which began by offending me, ends by overtaking
me.

On the whole the Sisters loathe relations. They look into the ward and
see the mothers and sisters and wives camped round the beds, and go back
into the bunk feeling that the ward doesn't belong to them.

The eldest Sister said to me yesterday: "Shut the door, nurse; there's
Captain Fellows's father. I don't want him fussing round."

On that we discussed relations, and it seemed to me that it was
inevitable that a Sister should be the only buffer between them and
their pressing anxieties.

"No, a relation is the last straw.... You don't understand!" she said.

I don't understand, but I am not specialized.

Long ago in the Mess I said to _my_ Sister, laughing: "I would go
through the four years' training just to wear that cap and cape!"

And she: "You couldn't go through it and come out as you are...."

Mr. Wicks has set his heart on crutches.

"If you won't try me on them I'll buy me own and walk out of here!"

Then I realize the vanity of his threat and the completeness of his
imprisonment, and hurry to suggest a new idea before he sees it too....

We set him on crutches....

He is brave. He said with anger, "I can't stand on these, they're too
long. You go and ask for some shorter ones...."

And thus together we slurred over the fact of that pendulous, nerveless
body which had hung from the crutches like an old stocking.

But all the evening he was buried in his own silence, and I suppose he
was looking at the vision on the bedrail.

A boy of seventeen was brought in yesterday with pneumonia.

He was so ill that he couldn't speak, and we put screens round his bed.
All the other patients in the ward immediately became convalescents.

I helped Sister to wash him, holding him on his side while he groaned
with pain; and Sister, no longer cynical, said, "T