“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 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....