because "yet thou hast not known me." The world comes next in
loneliness, but it is _big_, and with a big soul of its own. The family
life is almost naïve in its misunderstanding--no one listens, they just
wait for pauses....

... The worship of the "sane mind" has been a little overdone, I think.
The men who are prone to say of everyone that they "exaggerate a
little," or "are morbid," are like weights in a scale--just, but oh,
how heavy!...

... This war is fine, _fine_, FINE! I know it, and yet I don't get near
the fineness except in the pages of _Punch_! I see streams of men whose
language (Flemish) I don't speak, holding up protecting hands to keep
people from jostling a poor wounded limb, and I watch them sleeping
heavily, or eating oranges and smoking cigarettes down to the last hot
stump, but I don't hear of the heroic stands which I know are made, or
catch the volition of it all. Perhaps only in a voluntary army is such a
thing possible. Our own boys make one's heart beat, but these poor,
dumb, sodden little men, coming in caked with mud--to be patched up and
sent into a hole in the ground again, are simply tragic.

[Page Heading: "THE WOMAN'S TOUCH"]

_7 March._--"The woman's touch." When a woman has been down on her knees
scrubbing for a week, and washing for another week, a man, returning and
finding his house in order, and vaguely conscious of a newer and fresher
smell about it, talks quite tenderly of "a woman's touch."...

... There are some people who never care to enter a door unless it has
"passage interdite" upon it....