There is a most fearful uproar coming from the guest-room, where a large and rowdy party are entertaining the chorus of a travelling _revue_ company. I saw them when they arrived, horribly common-looking women, with legs like mine tubes. * * * * * Another day and still no news; I don't know how I shall stick it. She might have had the softness of heart to write to me. She knows my address. This evening a letter from the little mother, who asks whether I can find time to go to Frankfurt when I have leave; at the end of the letter she mentions that Rosa has joined the Women's Voluntary Auxiliary Corps of Army Nurses. I suppose she thought she'd like her photograph taken in some fancy uniform as "Rosa Freinland, one of our Frankfurt beauties, now on war work!" Holding the patient's hand is about the only work she intends doing. Women as a class are the same the world over. We are well supplied with English papers in the Mess here; they come regularly from Amsterdam, and in their pages I see, just as in ours, pictures of the Countess this and the Lord that, photographed in becoming attitudes doing war work. It seems agricultural pursuits are the fashion in England at present--wait till our U-boat war gets its knife well into their fat guts, it will be more than fashionable to work in the fields then. The British Empire is undeniably a great creation, or rather not so much a creation as a thing arrived at accidentally, but it lacks solidarity. It sprawls, a confused mass of races and creeds, around the world. Its very immensity lays it open to attack, it has a dozen Achilles heels from Ireland to Egypt and South Africa to India. I met a man only yesterday who was recently at the propaganda department of the Foreign Office, and without going into details he gave me a very good idea of the good work that is going on in Britain's canker spots. Ireland is considered particularly promising to those in the know. Now for an agitated night! To think that a girl should disturb me so! * * * * * Two days have passed, or, rather, dragged their interminable lengths away, for there is still not a vestige of news. I have been twice to the flat with no result, except to receive a piece of impertinence from the porter the last time I was there. No news. * * * * * Still no news, and we sail in forty-eight hours. _At sea, off the Isle of Wight_. It is some days since I turned for solace and enjoyment, amidst the discomforts of this life, to my pen and notebook. What strange tricks fate plays with us, and how lucky it is that one cannot foresee the future.