(Unposted.)
"Dear Sister,—Four more days before they will let me out of bed.... Whatever I promise to a patient in future I shall do, if I have to wear a notebook hanging on my belt.
"By which you will see that I am making discoveries!
"The quality of expectation in a person lying horizontally is wrought up to a high pitch. One is always expecting something. Generally it is food; three times a day it is the post; oftener it is the performance of some promise. The things that one asks from one's bed are so small: 'Can you get me a book?' 'Can you move that vase of flowers?' 'When you come up next time could you bring me an envelope?'
"But if one cannot get them life might as well stop.
"The wonder to me is how they stood me!
"I was always cheerful—I thought it a merit; I find instead it is an exasperation.
"I make a hundred reflections since my eyes are too bad to read. I stare at the ceiling, and if a moth comes on it—and just now that happened, or I would not have thought of mentioning it—I watch the pair of them, the moth and its leaping shadow, as they whirl from square to square of the smoke-ripened ceiling. This keeps my thoughts quiet.
"Then in the daytime there is the garden, the dog that crosses the lawn, the gardener talking to himself, the girl who goes to feed the hens....