declared that I was like nothing so much as two yards of pump-water. The work of resident physician and matron were combined in the person of one delightful woman, always immaculate in the whitest of white linen, who used to lend me books—her own books, not the hospital possessions—while the coming of the honoraries was always quite the event of each day. There is a fantastic illusion to the effect that women take no interest in their own sex. Anyone who could have seen how the coming of the visiting doctors was watched for by these poor women, many of them desperately ill, and have heard the conjectures made as to what they would wear, and the way the patients disputed together over the charms and “smartness” of their special honorary, might have lost all illusion on that point, once and for ever; if anything ever can destroy such a hidebound and century-old error. I think that convalescence was the most pleasant I have ever known, lying on a long couch in the balcony, looking out into sunlit courtyard with its huge fig-tree; the nurses in their pale green uniform flitting across it from the office to their dining-room; visitors coming and going; or the portress sweeping up leaves and burning them in a bonfire, from which the pungent smoke floated in a thin blue cloud up to the balcony. Then someone brought me a present of a soft grey dressing-gown, trimmed with pale blue silk, which I loved because I looked nice in it. I remember lending it one visiting day to a pretty girl whose young man used to come and see her—a matter of vast interest to us all; and she looked nicer still, because her blue eyes just matched the blue silk. She died a few months later, and I have always been sorry that I was not strong-minded enough to have given it her “for keeps,” as the children say.