Cooked, the attendance supercilious or inefficient, and where you have
to walk across a cold room at night - refinement of torture - in order to
turn out the electric light ere going to bed. That infamy is alone
enough to condemn these establishments, one and all.
Yes! And the beds; those frowsy, creaky, prehistoric wooden concerns,
always six or eight inches too short, whose mattresses have not been
turned round since they were made. What happens? You clamber into such a
receptacle and straightway roll downhill, down into its centre, into a
kind of river-bed where you remain fixed fast, while that monstrous
feather-abomination called a pillow, yielding to pressure, rises up on
either side of your head and engulfs eyes and nose and everything else
into its folds. No escape! You are strangled, smothered; you might as
well have gone to bed with an octopus. In this horrid contrivance you
lie for eight long hours, clapped down like a corpse in its coffin.
Every single bed in rural England ought to be burnt. Not one of them is
fit for a Christian to sleep in....
The days are growing hot.
A little tract of woodland surrounded by white walls and attached to the
convent on the neighbouring hill is a pleasant spot to while away the
afternoon hours. You can have it to yourself.
