falling dully on a long runner of corrugated rubber, with red borders
which drew together in the distance like the rails streaming away from
a train. Behind a closed door there suddenly rose, and as quickly died
away, a scream of pain. With an effort Sylvia resisted the impulse to
clap her hands over her ears.

"Here we are, at the minor operating-room," said Miss Lindstroem,
pausing. "It's against the rules, but if you want to look from across
the room--just to say you've been there--" She held the door open a
little, a suffocating odor of anaesthetics blew out in their faces,
like a breath from a dragon's cave. Mrs. Marshall and Judith stepped
forward. But Sylvia clutched at her mother's arm and whispered:
"Mother! Mother! I don't think I'll go on. I feel--I feel--I'll go
back down to the entrance hall to wait."

Mrs. Marshall nodded a preoccupied assent, and Sylvia fled away down
the endless corridor, looking neither to the right nor the left, down
repeated flights of scrubbed and sterilized marble stairs, into the
entrance hall, and, like a bolt from a bow, out of it on the other
side, out into the street, into the sunshine, the heat, the clatter,
the blessed, blessed smell of cabbage and dish-water....

After a time she went to sit down on the top step of the hospital
entrance to wait. She contemplated with exquisite enjoyment the
vigorous, profane, hair-pulling quarrel between two dirty little
savages across the street. She could have kissed her hand to the
loud-voiced woman who came scuffling to the window to scold them,
clutching a dirty kimono together over a Hogarth-like expanse of
bosom. They were well, these people, blood ran in their veins, their
skin was whole, they breathed air, not iodoform! Her mother had pulled
the string too tight, and Sylvia's ears were full of the ugly twang of
its snapping.

When, at last, Judith and Mrs. Marshall came out, hand-in-hand, Sylvia
sprang up to say: "What an _awful_ place! I hope I'll never have to
set foot in one again!" But quick as was her impulse to speech, her
perceptions were quicker, and before the pale exaltation of the other
two, she fell silent, irritated, rebellious, thoroughly alien. They
walked along in silence. Then Judith said, stammering a little with
emotion, "M-M-Mother, I want to b-b-b-be a trained n-n-nurse when I
grow up."

CHAPTER XIII

AN INSTRUMENT IN TUNE

As they drew near to their boarding-house late that afternoon, very
h