Life in a ward is all scurry and rush. I don't reflect; I'm putting on my cap anyhow, and my hands are going to the dogs.
I shall never get to understand Sisters; they are so strange, so tricky, uncertain as collies. Deep down they have an ineradicable axiom: that any visitor, any one in an old musquash coat, in a high-boned collar, in a spotted veil tied up at the sides, any one with whom one shakes hands or takes tea, is more important than the most charming patient (except, of course, a warded M.O.).
For this reason the "mouths" of the pillow-cases are all turned to face up the ward, away from the door.
I think plants in a ward are a barbarism, for as they are always arranged on the table by the door, it is again obvious that they are intended only to minister to the eye of the visitor, that race of gods.
In our ward there are eighteen fern-pots, some in copper, some in pink china, three in mauve paper, and one hanging basket of ferns. All of these have to be taken out on the landing at night and in again in the morning, and they have to be soaked under the tap.
The Sisters' minds are as yet too difficult for me, but in the minds of the V.A.D.'s I see certain salient features. I see already manifested in them the ardent longing to be alike. I know and remember this longing; it was present through all my early years in a large boarding-school; but there it was naturally corrected by the changes of growth and the inexpertness of youth. Here 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.