“See here, Sylvia!” she said abruptly, “do you know what I was thinking about back there in the crowd on the elevated?  I was thinking that lots of girls, no older than my girl, have to stand that twice a day, going to earn their livings.”

Sylvia chafed under the obviously admonitory tone of this.  “I don’t see that that makes it any easier for us if they do!” she said in a recalcitrant voice.  She stepped wide to avoid a pile of filth on the sidewalk, and clutched at her skirt.  She had a sudden vision of the white-tiled, velvet-carpeted florist’s shop in a corner of Aunt Victoria’s hotel where, behind spotless panes of shining plate-glass, the great clusters of cut-flowers dreamed away an enchanted life—­roses, violets, lilies of the valley, orchids....

“Here we are at the hospital,” said Mrs. Marshall, a perplexed line of worry between her brows.  But at once she was swept out of herself, forgot her seriously taken responsibility of being the mother of a girl like Sylvia.  She was only Barbara Marshall, thrilled by a noble spectacle.  She looked up at the great, clean, many-windowed facade above them, towering, even above the huge bulk of the gas-tanks across the street, and her dark eyes kindled.  “A hospital is one of the most wonderful places in the world!” she cried, in a voice of emotion.  “All this—­to help people get well!”

They passed into a wide, bare hall, where a busy young woman at a desk nodded on hearing their names, and spoke into a telephone.  There was an odd smell in the air, not exactly disagreeable, yet rather uncomfortably pungent.  “Oh, iodoform,” remarked the young woman at the desk, hearing them comment on it.  “Do you get it?  We don’t notice it here at all.”

Then came Miss Lindstroem’s sister, powerfully built, gaunt, gray, with a professional, impersonal cheerfulness.  The expedition began.  “I’ll take you to the children’s ward first,” said Miss Lindstroem; “that always interests visitors so much....”

Rows on rows of little white beds and white, bloodless faces with an awful patience on them, and little white hands lying in unchildlike quiet on the white spreads; rows on rows of hollow eyes turned in listless interest on the visitors; nurses in white, stepping briskly about, bending over the beds, lifting a little emaciated form, deftly unrolling a bandage; heat; a stifling smell of iodoform; a sharp sudden cry of pain from a distant corner; somewhere a dully beating pulse of low, suppressed sobs....

They were out of the children’s ward now, walking along a clean bare corridor.  Sylvia swallowed hard.  Her eyes felt burning.  Judith held her mother’s hand tightly.  Miss Lindstroem was explaining to Mrs. Marshall a new system of ventilation.

“This is one of the women’s wards,” 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.