A Diary Without Dates — Enid Bagnold

Excerpt: ...gives me pleasure because I am strong. In life nothing is too small to please. Once during the evening the eldest Sister said to me: "I am worried about your throat. Is it no better?" And from the pang of pleasure and gratitude that went through me I have learnt the value of such remarks. In every bed there is some one whose throat is at least more sore than mine. Though I am not one of those fierce V.A.D.'s who scoff at sore throats and look for wounds, yet I didn't know it was so easy to give pleasure. The strange, disarming ways of men and women! I stood in the bunk to-night beside the youngest Sister, and she looked up suddenly with her absent stare and said, "You're not so nice as you used to be!" I was dumbfounded. Had I been "nice"? And now different. What a maddening sentence, for I felt she Pg 76 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