How terrible has been the news of the spoliation of some of the lovely homes Hungjao Road way. Truly Shanghai folk get little encouragement to build their barns greater. It is an equal tragedy, of course, if a mud hut is taken which has provided all that one has known of home, but the fact that the wherewithal to rebuild elsewhere is available does not lessen the heart-break of seeing place one has built up with interest and love demolished through a quarrel which is not one's own.
When on holiday this year a Hungjao resident said to me: "When we lived in England we had fits if the roof leaked or a chimney-pot blew off, but now I don't know even if I have a house at all to go back to." Well, she hasn't now—not one that is liveable in at present Victories we may have seen, but it this type of victory is pursued too far we shall be looking down on worse than shattered homes. Shat-red hopes and possibilities are mor difficult to reconstruct especially when the tools of honest endeavour have been smashed from one's hand.
At which juncture of sad reflection.
Christabel, the boy comes in and tells me that, "washerman have got," so I'll go and count the sheets and trust as they flutter in the breeze to dry, that they will prove to be emblems of a truce and peace which the Powers permit, may soon flourish over us all in this sad. war-torn area.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.