What a maddening sentence, for I felt she was going to refuse me any
spoken explanation.
But one should not listen to what people say, only to what they mean,
and she was one of those persons whose minds one must read for oneself,
since her words so often deformed her thoughts.
The familiarity and equality of her tone seemed to come from some mood
removed from the hospital, where her mistrustful mind was hovering about
a trouble personal to herself.
She did not mean "You are not so nice...." but "You don't like me so
much...."
She was so young, it was all so new to her, she wanted so to be "liked"!
But there was this question of her authority....
How was she to live among her fellows?
Can one afford to disdain them? Can one steer happily with indifference?
Must one, to be "liked," bend one's spirit to theirs? And, most
disturbing question of all, is to be "liked" the final standard?
Whether to wear, or not to wear, a mask towards one's world? For there
is so much that is not ripe to show--change and uncertainty....
As she sat there, unfolding to me the fogs of her situation, her fresh
pink face clouded, her grand cap and red cape adding burdens of
authority to the toil of growth, I could readily have looked into the
glass to see if my hair was grey!
"Then there is nothing you condemn?" said the youngest Sister finally,
at the close of a conversation.
I have to-day come up against the bedrock of her integrity; it is
terrible. She has eternal youth, eternal fair hair, cold and ignorant
judgments. On things relating to the world I can't further soften her; a
man must do the rest.
"A gentleman ... a gentleman...." I am so tired of this cry for a
"gentleman."
Why can't they do very well with what they've got!
Here in the wards the Sisters have the stuff the world is made of laid
out, bedded, before their eyes; the ups and downs of man from the four
corners of the Empire and the hundred corners of social life, helpless
and in pyjamas--and they're not satisfied, but must cry for a
"gentleman"!
"I couldn't make a friend of that man!" the youngest Sister loves to add
to her criticism of a patient.