Dear Enemy

Do you remember Jervis's holding forth one evening for an hour or so

about our doctor's beautiful humanitarian ideals? C'EST A RIRE! The man

merely regards the J. G. H. as his own private laboratory, where he

can try out scientific experiments with no loving parents to object.

I shouldn't be surprised anyday to find him introducing scarlet fever

cultures into the babies' porridge in order to test a newly invented

serum.

Of the house staff, the only two who strike me as really efficient are

the primary teacher and the furnace-man. You should see how the children

run to meet Miss Matthews and beg for caresses, and how painstakingly

polite they are to the other teachers. Children are quick to size up

character. I shall be very embarrassed if they are too polite to me.

Just as soon as I get my bearings a little, and know exactly what we

need, I am going to accomplish some widespread discharging. I should

like to begin with Miss Snaith; but I discover that she is the niece

of one of our most generous trustees, and isn't exactly dischargeable.

She's a vague, chinless, pale-eyed creature, who talks through her nose

and breathes through her mouth. She can't say anything decisively and

then stop; her sentences all trail off into incoherent murmurings. Every

time I see the woman I feel an almost uncontrollable desire to take her

by the shoulders and shake some decision into her. And Miss Snaith is

the one who has had entire supervision of the seventeen little tots aged

from two to five! But, anyway, even if I can't discharge her, I have

reduced her to a subordinate position without her being aware of the

fact.

The doctor has found for me a charming girl who lives a few miles from

here and comes in every day to manage the kindergarten. She has big,

gentle, brown eyes, like a cow's, and motherly manners (she is just

nineteen), and the babies love her.

At the head of the nursery I have placed a jolly, comfortable

middle-aged woman who has reared five of her own and has a hand with

bairns. Our doctor also found her. You see, he is useful. She is

technically under Miss Snaith, but is usurping dictatorship in a

satisfactory fashion. I can now sleep at night without being afraid that

my babies are being inefficiently murdered.

You see, our reforms are getting started; and while I acquiesce with

all the intelligence at my command to our doctor's basic scientific

upheavals, still, they sometimes leave me cold. The problem that keeps

churning and churning in my mind is: How can I ever instil enough love

and warmth and sunshine into those bleak little lives? And I am not sure

that the doctor's science will accomplish that.