At moments I forget her position and, burning with resentment, I reflect, " ... this schoolgirl...."
To-day I walked down to the hospital thinking: "I must be stronger. It is I who, in the inverted position of things, should be the stronger. He is being tortured, and he has no release. He cannot even be alone a moment."
But at the hospital gates I thought of nothing but that I should see him.
In the bunk sat the eldest Sister, writing in a book. It passed through my head that the two Sisters had probably "sat" on my affairs together. I wondered without interest what the other had told her. Putting on my cap, I walked into the ward.
Surely his bed had had a pink eiderdown!
I walked up the ward and looked at it; but I knew without need of a second glance what had happened.
His bed was made in the fashion in which we make an empty bed, a bed that waits for a new patient. His locker was empty and stood open, already scrubbed. I smiled as I noticed they hadn't even left me that to do.
No one volunteered a word of explanation, no one took the trouble to say he had gone.
These women.... I smiled again. Only the comic phrase rang in my head "They've properly done me in! Properly done me in...."
I went downstairs and fetched the trays, and all the time the smile was on my lips. These women.... Somehow I had the better of the Sister. It is better to be in the wrong than in the right.