for my ladies, and for something
graceful and (odious word) dainty about them. Yesterday evening Lady
Bagot dined with me. This Villa is the only comfortable place I have
been in since the war began: it makes an amazing difference to my
health.

It is odd to have to admit that one has hardly ever been unhappy for a
long time before this war. The year my brother died, the year one went
through a tragedy, the year of deadly dullness in the country--but now
it isn't so much a personal matter. War and the sound of guns, and the
sense of destruction and death abroad, the solitude of it, and the
disappointing people! Oh, and the poor wounded--the poor, smelly, dirty
wounded, whom one sees all day, and for whom one just sticks this out.

I have only twice been for a drive out here, and I have not seen a
single place of interest, nor, indeed, a single interesting person
connected with the war. That, I suppose, is the result of being a
"cuisiniere!" It is rather strange to me, because for a very long time I
always seem to have had the best of things. To-day I hear of this
General or that Secretary, or this great personage or that important
functionary, but the only people whom I see are three little Sisters and
two Belgian cooks.

To give up work seems to me a little like divorcing a husband. There is
a feeling of failure about it, and the sense that one is giving up what
one has undertaken to do. So, however dull or tiresome husband or work
may be, one mustn't give them up.

[Page Heading: THE POWER OF THE BIBLE]

_6 March._--To-day I have been thinking, as I have often thought, that
the real power of the Bible is that it is a Universal Human Document.
The world is based upon sentiment--_i.e._, the personality of man and
his feelings brought to bear upon facts. It is also the world's dynamic
force. Now, the books of the Bible--especially, perhaps, the magical,
beautiful Psalms--are the most tender and sentimental (the word has been
misused, of course) that were ever written. They express the thoughts
and feelings of generations of men who always did express their thoughts
and feelings, and thought no shame of it. And so we northern people,
with our passionate inarticulateness, love to find ourselves expressed
in the old pages.

I find in the Gospels one of the few complaints of Christ. "Have I been
so long time with you and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?" All one
has ever felt is said for one in a phrase, all that o