“I have said from the first that women have no business in War-Hospitals. They’re the necessary complement of the camp and the battle-field, and they’ll be horrible and ghastly as long as the world lasts. The things that are seen in them are too grim to be talked about! But why need we talk? We can’t better things by talking!”
“I agree with you perfectly,” she said, with a fine smile of sarcasm. “But the condition of things I have described is, since yesterday, astonishingly improved.... To begin with, those Augean floors have been thoroughly scrubbed!”
“Surely not by—ladies?”
“By the Sisters of Charity, aided by the Hospital orderlies who had told them—‘It cannot be done!’ They said: ‘It must’—and set the example forthwith!”
He commented:
“That’s the pace that kills. They’ll never be able to hold on at it!”
“Wait and prove! I credit Ada and her nuns with immense reserves of energy. They waste no words. But, oh! Lord Cardillon, when I think that all this abomination and misery lay close at our doors—here in Constantinople—and that I and others never knew of it—never dreamed of it!—I burn with shame and sicken with disgust. No! I do not exaggerate!”
Her sewing had fallen to the deck. Her white hands wrung themselves in her lap. Her matronly calm face was contracted and quivering. She continued:
“I sent from our kitchen at the Embassy quantities of broth and jelly and other articles of invalid diet. Wine from the cellars and so on. But neither I nor Stratclyffe ever went there—to our shame never thought of going there! And but for those articles in the English papers we never should have known——”
He ground his spurred heel into the deck, and something very like an oath escaped from him.