They think I’m a weird one here, because I want my window open. Twenty-nine times a day at least an _infirmière_ will come hurrying in and bang it shut and twenty-nine times a day I crawl out of bed and open it again. The nursing here is all done by _infirmières_, or untrained women under the direction of two real nurses, one in charge of this wing during the day, the other during the night. Some of these _infirmières_ go about in curl papers, others wear sabots. They mean well enough, but they are overworked, and frankly peasant types, with little education and almost no notion of cleanliness or of much else that is supposed to pertain to nursing. Last night a fat old soul without many teeth came waddling into my room to have a look at that interesting curiosity, _la pauvre petite Dame Américaine_. When she saw my open window she was so overcome with astonishment that she hurried out and fetched a companion to regard the phenomenon. The two of them stood and stared at it and discussed the matter between themselves for quite a while, then the fat one turned to me and remarked with a toothless but engaging smile; it was very warm in America where I lived, was it not? When I replied that, instead, it was much colder in winter there than here in Paris, they looked aghast and flatly incredulous. Their only explanation of the matter had been, it seemed, that I was accustomed to living in the tropics and just didn’t have sense enough to suit my habits to the atmosphere. Just outside the hospital there is a munitions factory. At night the light over the front door shines into my room and day and night the machinery keeps up an incessant thudding hum that says as plain as words over and over and over: _Kill the Boches. Kill the Boches. Kill the Boches._ Once in a long while the machines stop for a few moments in order, I suppose, to catch their breath and then I grow dreadfully worried, for I know that if someone doesn’t keep on killing the Boches every second, they will be breaking through the lines and pouring in over France in great drowning grey waves. January 27. I haven’t got the measles after all; I have the German measles, only they don’t call it that in French I am glad to say. At first I was so very red and speckled that they thought I had the _rougeole_, but now they have decided it is only the _rubeole_ after all. A concourse of doctors considered me yesterday morning and pronounced the verdict. “But then,” I demanded, “if it’s only the _rubeole_ can’t I be leaving _tout de suite_?” For the French do not consider quarantine necessary for the rubeole. “Eight days,” they answered, and when I expostulated they turned on their collective heels and marched callously out the door, each one holding up eight fingers apiece as a parting rejoinder.