I swallowed a cup of tea and had a wash on the cheerless northern station; then I took a mouldy old fly that smelt of innumerable weddings and funerals, and set out for Lynn Lytton Hospital, and as I travelled past the rows of grey stone houses I felt myself shedding my high-flown courage of the morning feather by feather, until I became the reserved, nervous little coward I had always been. Furthermore, I began to feel very sick.
I feel with intense earnestness that Charlotte Corday and Nurse Cavell and Christobel Pankhurst, and those wonderful women who fought in the Russian Army, could never have felt sick as I can feel sick, or they would have stopped in the middle of their heroic deeds and gone home to bed.
I can think of nothing more unheroic than to feel sick on all the great and emotional occasions of your life.
We seemed to climb Lynn Lytton, it was high up on a hill, and by the time we reached it the birds were twittering their benedictions and the first stars were netted in the tree-tops.
I told the cabman to wait, and climbed some steps—they seemed like the steps of the Monument.
I am glad the door opened at once, or I would have turned and bolted down them like a rabbit.
I must have been feeling pretty bad, because there was some late clematis clinging to one of the pillars of the portico, and they seemed to me in the twilight like large and particularly meaty spiders.
I want so badly to write of the heroic sentiments and thoughts I had, but I was sick, and the clematis looked like fat spiders, and I wanted to run away. That is the honest truth.
"I want to see Captain Markham," I told the sister who came to the door.
"It is after visiting hours," said the sister gently. "Are you his wife?"