time and place. It was like repeating some common word over and over
again until it loses all significance except that of a peculiar sound.

It broke me at last. I became ill. What hundreds of other girls were
able to do every day the year round, had finished me in three weeks. I
was as soft as a baby. It was my nerves that gave way. I got to crying
one night over some trivial little thing, and I couldn't stop. They took
me to a hospital, I don't remember how or when. I became aware of
trained nurses. I drifted back to the consciousness of a queer grating
sound near the head of my bed, which they told me was an elevator; I
smelled anesthetics. I realized a succession of nights and days. There
were flowers. There was a frequent ringing of bells. Heaven couldn't
have been more restful. I loved to lie there and watch a breeze blow the
sash-curtains at the windows, in and out with a gentle, ship-like
motion. Esther visited me often. Sometimes she sat by the window alone,
correcting proof (she had secured a position in a publishing house the
first of the summer), and sometimes one of the other girls of our little
circle was with her. I never talked with them; I never questioned; they
came and went; I felt no curiosity. They tell me I lay there like that
for nearly three weeks, and then suddenly with no warning and with no
sense of shock or surprise the veil lifted.

Esther and the struggling artist we called Rosa were by the window. They
had both come from the same little town in Pennsylvania. I'd been
watching them for half an hour or more. They had been talking. I had
liked the murmur of their low voices. In the most normal fashion in the
world I began to listen to their conversation.

"I wouldn't have had the courage," I heard Rosa say.

"Why not?" replied Esther. "Her family could do no more than is being
done. If they took her home now, she'd never come back again. Her spirit
would be broken. That wouldn't be good for her. Besides _they_ don't
need her, while I--why, she's the only human being in the world that's
ever meant anything in my life, and I am thirty-three. It has been
almost like having had a child dependent on me--having had _her_, giving
her a new point of view, taking care of her _now_."

"Well, but how long can you stand the expense of this private room, and
the doctors?"

"You needn't worry about that," Esther shrugged.

"But it seems a shame, Esther," burst out Rosa, "just when your father's
esta