I often think of our poor at home, and wish I had a few sacks full of things for them!  I have not myself come across any instances of poverty nearly as bad as I have seen in England.  I understand from Dr. Joos and other Belgians who know about these things that there is still a good deal of money tucked away in this country.  I hope there is, and we all want to help the Belgians over a bad time, but it would be better and more dignified for them to get it through their own Government.

I had tea with Lady Bagot the other day, and afterwards I had a chat with Prince Francis at the English Mission.  Another afternoon I went down to the Kursaal Hotel for tea.  The stuffy sitting-room there is always filled with knickerbockered, leather-coated ladies and with officers in dark blue uniform, who talk loudly and pat the barmaid’s cheeks.  She seems to expect it; it is almost etiquette.  A cup of bad tea, some German trophies examined and discussed, and then I came away with a “British” longing for skirts for my ladies, and for something graceful and (odious word) dainty about them.  Yesterday evening Lady Bagot dined with me.  This Villa is the only comfortable place I have been in since the war began:  it makes an amazing difference to my health.

It is odd to have to admit that one has hardly ever been unhappy for a long time before this war.  The year my brother died, the year one went through a tragedy, the year of deadly dullness in the country—­but now it isn’t so much a personal matter.  War and the sound of guns, and the sense of destruction and death abroad, the solitude of it, and the disappointing people!  Oh, and the poor wounded—­the poor, smelly, dirty wounded, whom one sees all day, and for whom one just sticks this out.

I have only twice been for a drive out here, and I have not seen a single place of interest, nor, indeed, a single interesting person connected with the war.  That, I suppose, is the result of being a “cuisiniere!” It is rather strange to me, because for a very long time I always seem to have had the best of things.  To-day I hear of this General or that Secretary, or this great personage or that important functionary, but the only people whom I see are three little Sisters and two Belgian cooks.

To give up work seems to me a little like divorcing a husband.  There is a feeling of failure about it, and the sense that one is giving up what one has undertaken to do.  So, however dull or tiresome husband or work may be, one mustn’t give them up.

[Page Heading:  THE POWER OF THE BIBLE]

6 March.—­To-day I have been thinking, as I have often thought, that the real power of the Bible is that it is a Universal Human Document.  The world is based upon sentiment—­i.e., the personality of man and his feelings brought to bear upon facts.  It is also the world’s dynamic force.  Now, the books of the Bible—­especially, perhaps, the magical, beautiful Psalms—­are the most tender and sentimental (the word has been misused, of course) that were ever written.  They express the thoughts and feelings of generations of men who always did express their thoughts and feelings, and thought no shame of it.  And so we northern people, with our passionate inarticulateness, love to find ourselves expressed in the old pages.