"I couldn't make a friend of that man!" the youngest Sister loves to add to her criticism of a patient.
It isn't my part as a V.A.D. to cry, "Who wants you to?"
"I couldn't trust that man!" the youngest Sister will say equally often.
This goes deeper....
But whom need one trust? Brother, lover, friend ... no more. Why wish to trust all the world?...
"They are not real men," she says, "not men through and through."
That's where she goes wrong; they are men through and through—patchy, ordinary, human. She means they are not men after her pattern.
Something will happen in the ward. Once I have touched this bedrock in her I shall be for ever touching it till it gets sore!
One should seek for no response. They are not elastic, these nuns....