xclaimed, "I'll take you myself!" and she
perceived that he was going to do something which he should have
delegated to a porter, so that he might continue to display himself and
his office to these two strangers.

As they passed under the arch into the hospital grounds she kept her arm
in Richard's because the warmth of his body made it seem impossible that
the flesh could ever grow quite cold, and fixed her attention on the
little clerk, because he offered a proof that the character of life was
definitely comic. But these frail assurances, that were but conceits
made by the mind while it marked time before charging the dreaded truth,
were overcome by the strangeness of this place. The paved corridor that
followed on and on was built with waist-high walls, and between the
pillars that held up the gabled wooden roof the light streamed out on
lawns of coarse grass pricking rain-gleaming sod; at intervals they
passed the immense swing doors of the wards, glaringly bright with brass
and highly polished gravy-coloured wood; at times another corridor ran
into it, and at their meeting-place there blew a swift unnatural wind,
private to this place and laden with the scentless scent of damp stone;
down one such they saw a group of women walking, wrapped in cloaks of
different colours, flushed and cheered from some night meal, making
among themselves the infantile merriment that nuns and nurses know.

This was a city unlike any other. It was set apart for the sick; and
some sick people died; and of course there was no reason that people
should not die merely because they were greatly beloved. She sobbed; and
the clerk, who was walking on ahead of them with the gait of one who
carries a standard, turned round and, waving the key, which there could
be no occasion for him to use, as all the doors were open, said kindly:
"You know you mustn't be downhearted. I've seen folk who came down on
the verra same errand as yourselves go away in the morning with fine an'
happy faces." But after half a minute the intense intellectual honesty
without which he could not have been so marked a character reasserted
itself, and he turned again and added reluctantly, "But I've known more
that didn't." She laughed on to Richard's shoulder and crammed the
speeches greedily into her memory, that some night soon by the hearth in
the sitting-room at Hume Park Square she might repeat them to her
mother, whom she figured sitting in the armchair, looking rem