Between the hours of seven and eight, when the ward was all tidied up ready for the night, the women’s husbands were allowed in to see their wives. It was midsummer, I remember, for I had my Christmas dinner there—and at that hour the long ward was filled with a tender twilight. We women who had no one to come and see us used to turn over on our sides and gaze out of the window at the leaves of the fig-tree, black against the pink sky—at least, I did, because there were no beds that way, other lonely patients, with a husband and wife on either side, having to lie on their backs and stare out stolidly in front of them; still, one could not help seeing the men tiptoeing in—some in their Sunday black, others straight from work in their blue dungarees—and noticing how the faces of some of the wives would flush and glow, as if a lamp had been lit behind the transparent white mask. And how the man would hold one hand in his, and fling his other arm over the pillow, above his woman’s head, and say very little, while she talked eagerly, incessantly, in a little weak whisper. We did not want to see all this. Not that they minded, as long as one was not ill-bred enough to stare deliberately; but it gave us a nasty lumpy feeling in our throats—_nous autres_ who had nobody to come and see us during that twilight hour, which always seems so completely made for intimacy. There is, I suppose, no state of life that does not bring its own pleasure and its own pain; and though perhaps, the ups of life are the most comfortable, on the whole I would award the palm for interest to the downs; and I for one never learnt more, from all of the world that I have known, than I did from the eight weeks in that hospital ward, where the very atmosphere seemed to breathe content and good feeling as palpably as it did iodoform and carbolic.