i would like to get something for the servers in the dining hall and also the mailroom lady. i don't know what though. it just seems so rotten to eat some place for 3 years and say hi to them every day and then you go away and they only know this because you don't show up anymore it just makes these people seem so - incidental in your life. and they are, perhaps, but not to at least say goodbye means that - you won't acknowledge their relationship to you as more than furniture has to you. i don't know what to get though, that wouldn't be overly gratuitous or soppy. and there's no time left, anyway, the dining hall closes this friday noon, and i'm out of meals. the mailroom lady is a different matter. she has had to hunt for my lost parcels half a dozen times a semester, and i get a lot of them. and she always looks so cross and harassed too. wasn't there this bit in the phoenix and the carpet where one of the children wished someone was angelically good-tempered, and she was? what that was apropos i can't figure out. oh! i know. i wanted to say that, she must be beastly bad tempered because she has to stand behind a window all day and hand people parcels and make them sign for them, like the bad-tempered woman in the nesbit, and if she felt she wasn't just furniture, maybe she would be happy and angelically good-tempered again!