I love the long, the dim and lonely, corridor; the light centred in the gleam of the trays, salt-cellars, yellow butters, cylinders of glass....
Impermanency.... I don't wonder the Sisters grow so secret, so uneager. How often stifled! How often torn apart!
It's heaven to me to be one of such a number of faces.
To see them pass into Mess like ghosts—gentleman, tinker, and tailor; each having shuffled home from death; each having known his life rock on its base ... not talking much—for what is there to say?—not laughing much for they have been here too long—is a nightly pleasure to me.
Creatures of habit! All the coloured dressing-gowns range themselves round the two long tables—this man in this seat, that man by the gas-fire; this man with his wheel-chair drawn up at the end, that man at the corner where no one will jostle his arm.
Curious how these officers leave the hospital, so silently. Disappearances.... One face after another slips out of the picture, the unknown heart behind the face fixed intently on some other centre of life.
I went into a soldiers' ward to-night to inquire about a man who has pneumonia.
Round his bed there stood three red screens, and the busy, white-capped heads of two Sisters bobbed above the rampart.
It suddenly shocked me. What were they doing there? Why the screens? Why the look of strain in the eyes of the man in the next bed who could see behind the screens?