After this fiendish attack had been in progress long enough for everyone to get up and dress, Mrs. Conger came back to our room, and her manner was more than tragic when she saw me lying on my mattress on the floor, not even beginning to dress for what I suppose half of the women in the compound believed to be the beginning of the final fight. She said: “Do you wish to be found undressed when the end comes?” It flashed through my mind that it made very little difference whether I was massacred in a pink silk dressing-gown, that I had hanging over the back of a chair, or whether I was in a golf skirt and shirt waist that I was in the habit of wearing during the day hours of this charming picnic. So I told her that for some nights I had dressed myself and sat on the edge of the mattress wishing I was lying down again, only to be told, when daylight came, that the attack was over, when it was invariably too late for anything like sleep (which way of living is distinctly trying), and after a week of it, when one has so much to do in the day hours, I had come to the conclusion that, as it was absolutely of no benefit to anyone my being dressed during these attacks, I was going to stay in bed unless something terrible happened, when I should don my dressing-gown and, with a pink bow of ribbon at my throat, await my massacre. This way of looking, or I should rather say of speaking, did not appeal to the Minister’s wife, but I must say that at such terrible moments during the siege it is a great comfort to be frivolous. By making believe that one is not afraid one really lessen one’s own fear. “Assume a virtue if you have it not,” says our beloved Shakespeare. After Mrs. Conger’s visit on this same terrible, ear-deafening night came Clara, Mrs. Squiers’s German nursery governess, and she needed all sorts of assurances to convince her that a massacre was not in progress at that very moment. These attacks are very terrifying, and to talk to a person two feet away one has to shriek. People one sees are either apparently most optimistic or desperately pessimistic, nothing between. It is a horrid thing to see big, strong men unable to hide their innate cowardliness, and shirking all duty of the slightest personal danger. _Friday, June 29._