place beneath the consciousness where the soul debates of its
being, and there, as could be seen from the droop of the shoulders and
the nervous contraction of the hand that was common to all, was raising
doubt and fear. The nature of this scene was disclosed as a nurse at the
end of the passage passed through a swing door, and they looked for one
moment into the long cavern of a ward, lit with the dreadful light which
dwells in hospitals while the healthy lie in darkness, that dreadful
light which throbs like a headache and frets like fever, the very colour
of pain. This light is diffused all over the world in these inhuman
parallelogrammic cities of the sick, and sometimes it comes to a focus.
It had come to a focus now, in the room which they had just left, where
mother was lying.

She ran forward to the middle-aged doctor, whom she knew would be the
better one. "Can you do nothing for her?" she stammered appealingly. She
wrung her hands in what she knew to be a distortion of ordinary
movement, because it seemed suitable that to draw attention to the
extraordinary urgency of her plea she should do extraordinary things.
"Mother--mother's a most remarkable woman...."

The doctor pulled his moustache and said that there was always hope, in
a tone that left none, and then, as if he were ashamed of his impotence
and were trying to turn the moment into something else, spoke in medical
terms of Mrs. Melville's case and translated them into ordinary
language, so that he sounded like a construing schoolboy. "Pulmonary
dyspnoea--settled on her chest--heart too weak to do a tracheotomy--run
a tube down...." They opened the door of the room and told her to go
into it. She paused at the threshold and wept, though she could not see
her mother, because the room was so like her mother's life. There was
hardly anything in it at all. There were grey distempered walls, a large
window covered by a black union blind, polished floors, two cane chairs,
and a screen of an impure green colour. The roadside would have been a
richer death-chamber, for among the grass there would have been several
sorts of weed; yet this was appropriate enough for a woman who had known
neither the hazards of being a rogue's wife, which she would have rather
enjoyed, nor the close-pressed society of extreme poverty, in which she
would have triumphed, for her birdlike spirits would have made her
popular in any alley, but had been locked by her husband's innumerab