And here I may mention that, deeply as I admire all the girls who are working so splendidly in France, I think perhaps my meed of admiration brims highest for those members of the G.S.V.A.D.'s who are gently born, for this very reason of the sleeping accommodation. Let us be frank, and admit that for the generality of working girls, such as the Waacs and a large proportion of the G.S.V.A.D.'s, it is not nearly so great a hardship to sleep in dormitories as it is for girls who have, as a matter of course, always been accustomed to privacy. It is not so bad in the case of members of a G.S. convoy such as that I have mentioned, where the girls are all friends, but what of those ladies who live in the big camps and sleep in long huts with other girls of every class, all, doubtless, decent good girls, but, in the nature of things, often girls with whom any ground of meeting must be limited to the barest commonalities of life? Also sometimes those in authority--those who are and always were professionals, not amateurs--have been known to use the power given to them, by the inferior rating of these girls, to make them rather miserable. Personally, I have long had a theory, which will doubtless bring down on me howls of rage from those who will say I am decrying the most noble of professions, that women are not meant to be nurses. It brings out all that is worst in them. The love of routine for its own sake, that deadly snare to which women and Government officials succumb so much more easily than do men, is fostered in them. And so is the love of authority for their own sakes, which is almost worse. It has taken nothing less than this way to show what splendid creatures nurses are under their starched aprons. In times of peace only amateur women should be nurses; for it may be observed that the V.A.D. nurses, though they have had long enough to do it in, have not developed the subtle disease of nursitis. Evidently nursing is a thing, like love-making, which should never become a profession. I was glad to have seen all the different convoys I had, because no two had been to me alike, and to each I am indebted for a differing expression of the same vision, which is the vision splendid of a duty undertaken gladly and sustained with courage. From my first convoys--the Fannies and the G.S.V.A.D.'s--I got the wonderful facts of it, at the V.A.D. Convoy at E---- I caught that side of it which I was most glad of all to encounter, and at the V.A.D. Convoy at T---- I found that delightful spirit of sheer joy in danger which is too precious to be allowed to die out of the world just because there happens to be, at present, such a great deal too much danger let loose upon it. CHAPTER XII REST