released.

One does not wash up when one makes splints, one does not change the
pillow-cases--forcing the resentful pillow down, down till the corners
of the case are filled--nor walk the ward in search of odd jobs.

But these are not the reasons....

Just as I liked the unending laying of the trays in the corridor, so
making splints appears to me a gentle work in which one has time to look
at and listen to the ward with more penetrating eyes, with wider ears--a
work varied by long conversations with Pinker about his girl and the
fountain-pen trade.

But I ought not to have asked if she were pretty.

At first he didn't answer and appeared to be thinking very seriously--of
a way out, perhaps.

"Does fer me all right," he presently said.

The defence of his girl occupied his attention, for after a few minutes
he returned to it: "Sensible sort of girl. She ain't soft. Can cook an'
all that."

I went on sewing my splint.

Almost reluctantly he pursued: "Got 'er photograph 'ere." But he did not
get up at once, and we turned to the fountain-pens. "Any nib," he said,
"crossed ever so, _I_ could mend it. Kep' the books too; we was always
stocktaking."

Now I think of it, fountain-pen shops always _are_ stocktaking. They do
it all down the Strand, with big red labels across the front.

He rose suddenly and crossed to his locker to look for her photograph,
returning after a few minutes with a bundle of little cardboards. The
first I turned over was that of a pretty fair-haired girl. "Is that
her?" I asked. "She's pretty!" "That's 'er young sister," he answered. I
turned over the rest, and he pointed out his family one by one--last of
all his girl.

There are some men who are not taken in by a bit of fair hair.

One knows what these cheap photographs are, how they distort and
blacken. The girl who looked at me from this one appeared to be a
monster.

She had an enormous face, enormous spectacles, bands of galvanized iron
drawn across her forehead for hair....

"Ther's just them two, 'er an 'er sister. 'Er sister ain't got a feller
yet."

I praised his girl to Pinker, and praised Pinker to myself.

"A girl friend," he said, "keeps yer straighter than a man. Makes yer
punctual."

"So she won't wait for you when you are late?"

"Not a minute over time," he said with pride. "I used to be a terror
when I first knew 'er; kep' 'er waitin' abaht. She soon cured me, did F.
Steel."

"You are a funny little bird,