Although I am unable to claim quite as many years as my friend the old
minister, my experience coincides with his, the "decent bodies" are in
a great majority, I have met them everywhere amongst all classes, and
in every part of the world, and their skins are not always white.
They may not be conspicuously to the fore, for the "decent bodies" are
not given to self-advertisement. They have no love for the limelight,
and would be distinctly annoyed should their advent be heralded with a
flourish of trumpets. In the garden-borders the mignonette is a very
inconspicuous little plant, and passes almost unnoticed beside the
flaunting gaudiness of the dahlia or the showy spikes of the
hollyhock, yet it is from that modest, low-growing, grey-green flower
that comes the sweetness that perfumes the whole air, for the most
optimistic person would hardly expect fragrance from dahlias or
hollyhocks. They have their uses; they are showy, decorative and
aspiring, but they do not scent the garden.
Between 1914 and 1918 I, in common with most people, came across
countless hundreds of "decent bodies," many of them wearing V.A.D.
nurse's uniforms. These little women did not put on their nurse's
uniform merely to pose before a camera with elaborately made-up eyes
and a carefully studied sympathetic expression, to return to ordinary
fashionable attire at once afterwards.
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