and swearing and
blaspheming!"

"I know, awful sorry but--Gosh all fish-hooks, look how I burned my
hand! Gee whiz, it hurts! It hurts like the mischief! Why, that damn
radiator is hot as--it's hot as--it's hotter 'n the hinges of Hades!
Look! You can see the mark!"

So, as they drove up to St. Mary's Hospital, with the nurses already
laying out the instruments for an operation to save her life, it was
she who consoled him and kissed the place to make it well, and though
he tried to be gruff and mature, he yielded to her and was glad to be
babied.

The ambulance whirled under the hooded carriage-entrance of the
hospital, and instantly he was reduced to a zero in the nightmare
succession of cork-floored halls, endless doors open on old women
sitting up in bed, an elevator, the anesthetizing room, a young interne
contemptuous of husbands. He was permitted to kiss his wife; he saw a
thin dark nurse fit the cone over her mouth and nose; he stiffened at a
sweet and treacherous odor; then he was driven out, and on a high stool
in a laboratory he sat dazed, longing to see her once again, to insist
that he had always loved her, had never for a second loved anybody else
or looked at anybody else. In the laboratory he was conscious only of a
decayed object preserved in a bottle of yellowing alcohol. It made him
very sick, but he could not take his eyes from it. He was more aware of
it than of waiting. His mind floated in abeyance, coming back always
to that horrible bottle. To escape it he opened the door to the right,
hoping to find a sane and business-like office. He realized that he was
looking into the operating-room; in one glance he took in Dr. Dilling,
strange in white gown and bandaged head, bending over the steel table
with its screws and wheels, then nurses holding basins and cotton
sponges, and a swathed thing, just a lifeless chin and a mound of white
in the midst of which was a square of sallow flesh with a gash a little
bloody at the edges, protruding from the gash a cluster of forceps like
clinging parasites.

He shut the door with haste. It may be that his frightened repentance of
the night and morning had not eaten in, but this dehumanizing interment
of her who had been so pathetically human shook him utterly, and as he
crouched again on the high stool in the laboratory he swore faith to his
wife . . . to Zenith . . . to business efficiency . . . to the Boosters'
Club . . . to every faith of the Clan of Good