s," said their leader, opening another
swinging door, from which rushed forth a fresh blast of iodoform. More
rows of white beds, each with its mound of suffering, each with its
haggard face of pain. More nurses, bearing basins of curious shape,
bandages, hot-water bottles, rubber tubes. There was more restlessness
here than in the children's ward, less helpless prostration before the
Juggernaut of disease ... fretfulness, moans, tossing heads, wretched
eyes which stared at the visitors in a hostile indifference.

"Oh, they are just putting the dressing on such an _interesting_
case!" said Miss Lindstroem's voice coming to Sylvia from a great
distance. She spoke with the glow of professional enthusiasm, with
that certainty, peculiar to sincere doctors and nurses, that a
complicated wound is a fascinating object.

In spite of herself Sylvia had one glimpse of horribly lacerated red
tissues.... She gripped her hands together after this and looked
fixedly at a button on her glove, until Miss Lindstroem's voice
announced: "It's the Embury stitch that makes that possible: we've
just worked out the application of it to skin-graft cases. Two years
ago she'd have lost her leg. Isn't it simply splendid!"

She said cordially as they moved forward: "Sister Selma said to treat
you as though you were the Queen of Sweden, and I am! You're seeing
things that visitors are _never_ allowed to see."

They walked on and on interminably, past innumerable sick souls,
each whirling alone in a self-centered storm of suffering; and then,
somehow, they were in a laboratory, where an immensely stout and
immensely jovial doctor in white linen got down from a high stool to
shake hands with them and profess an immense willingness to entertain
them. "... but I haven't got anything much today," he said, with a
disparaging wave of his hand towards his test-tubes. "Not a single
death-warrant. Oh yes, I have too, one brought in yesterday." He
brought them a test-tube, stoppered with cotton, and bade them note
a tiny bluish patch on the clear gelatine at the bottom. "That means
he's a dead one, as much as if he faced the electric chair," he
explained. To the nurse he added, "A fellow in the men's ward,
Pavilion G. Very interesting culture ... first of that kind I've had
since I've been here." As he spoke he was looking at Sylvia with an
open admiration, bold, intrusive, flippant.

They were passing along another corridor, hot, silent, their footsteps