"How much of us lives when we are entirely shut out of the consciousness of those whom we love? If there is no one to _realize_ us day by day,--if all that love has made of us is taken away, what is left? Is there anything? I don't know. I look in the glass, and see the same face,--Eleanor Hamlin, almost nineteen, with the same bow shaped eyebrows, and the same double ridge leading up from her nose to her mouth, making her look still very babyish. I pinch myself, and find that it hurts just the same as it used to six months ago, but there the resemblance to what I used to be, stops. I'm a young nurse now in hospital training, and very good at it, too, if I do say it as shouldn't; but that's all I am. Otherwise, I'm not anybody _to_ anybody,--except a figure of romance to good old Stevie, who doesn't count in this kind of reckoning. I take naturally to nursing they tell me. A nurse is a kind of maternal automaton. I'm glad I'm that, but there used to be a lot more of me than that. There ought to be some heart and brain and soul left over, but there doesn't seem to be. Perhaps I am like the Princess in the fairy story whose heart was an auk's egg. Nobody had power to make her feel unless they reached it and squeezed it. "I feel sometimes as if I were dead. I wish I could know whether Uncle Peter and Aunt Beulah were married yet. I wish I could know that. There is a woman in this hospital whose suitor married some one else, and she has nervous prostration, and melancholia. All she does all day is to moan and wring her hands and call out his name. The nurses are not very sympathetic. They seem to think that it is disgraceful to love a man so much that your whole life stops as soon as he goes out of it. What of Juliet and Ophelia and Francesca de Rimini? They loved so they could not tear their love out of their hearts without lacerating them forever. There is that kind of love in the world,--bigger than life itself. All the big tragedies of literature were made from it,--why haven't people more sympathy for it? Why isn't there more dignity about it in the eyes of the world? "It is very unlucky to love, and to lose that which you cherish, but it is unluckier still never to know the meaning of love, or to find 'Him whom your soul loveth.' I try to be kind to that poor forsaken woman. I am sorry for his sake that she calls out his name, but she seems to be in such torture of mind and body that she is unable to help it. "They are trying to cut down expenses here, so they have no regular cook, the housekeeper and her helper are supposed to do it all. I said I would make the desserts, so now I have got to go down-stairs and make some fruit gelatin. It is best that I should not write any more to-day, anyway." * * * * * Later, after the Thanksgiving holiday, she wrote: * * * * *