As she let the ether drip, nervously trying to keep the rhythm that Kennicott had indicated, Carol stared at her husband with the abandon of hero-worship.

He shook his head.  “Bad light—­bad light.  Here, Mrs. Morgenroth, you stand right here and hold this lamp.  Hier, und dieses—­dieses lamp halten—­so!”

By that streaky glimmer he worked, swiftly, at ease.  The room was still.  Carol tried to look at him, yet not look at the seeping blood, the crimson slash, the vicious scalpel.  The ether fumes were sweet, choking.  Her head seemed to be floating away from her body.  Her arm was feeble.

It was not the blood but the grating of the surgical saw on the living bone that broke her, and she knew that she had been fighting off nausea, that she was beaten.  She was lost in dizziness.  She heard Kennicott’s voice—­

“Sick?  Trot outdoors couple minutes.  Adolph will stay under now.”

She was fumbling at a door-knob which whirled in insulting circles; she was on the stoop, gasping, forcing air into her chest, her head clearing.  As she returned she caught the scene as a whole:  the cavernous kitchen, two milk-cans a leaden patch by the wall, hams dangling from a beam, bats of light at the stove door, and in the center, illuminated by a small glass lamp held by a frightened stout woman, Dr. Kennicott bending over a body which was humped under a sheet—­the surgeon, his bare arms daubed with blood, his hands, in pale-yellow rubber gloves, loosening the tourniquet, his face without emotion save when he threw up his head and clucked at the farmwife, “Hold that light steady just a second more—­noch blos esn wenig.”

“He speaks a vulgar, common, incorrect German of life and death and birth and the soil.  I read the French and German of sentimental lovers and Christmas garlands.  And I thought that it was I who had the culture!” she worshiped as she returned to her place.

After a time he snapped, “That’s enough.  Don’t give him any more ether.”  He was concentrated on tying an artery.  His gruffness seemed heroic to her.

As he shaped the flap of flesh she murmured, “Oh, you are wonderful!”

He was surprised.  “Why, this is a cinch.  Now if it had been like last week——­Get me some more water.  Now last week I had a case with an ooze in the peritoneal cavity, and by golly if it wasn’t a stomach ulcer that I hadn’t suspected and——­There.  Say, I certainly am sleepy.  Let’s turn in here.  Too late to drive home.  And tastes to me like a storm coming.”

IX

They slept on a feather bed with their fur coats over them; in the morning they broke ice in the pitcher—­the vast flowered and gilt pitcher.