"After a while," Monet went on, "when I got almost to the snapping point, they sent me to Ward Six. You know how it is--like a clear, cold plunge ... it wakes you up... There's a method in it all. They know that after a week in hell you find even purgatory desirable." "And yet, once you got away, you traveled the same road that had brought you here in the first place... Was the game worth the candle?" "It was an escape while it lasted, even though it did lead me to prison again... But isn't that where escape always leads? The world is a good deal like Fairview--a rule-ridden institution on a larger scale... We escape for a time in our work, in our play, in our loves, but the tether's pretty short. ... And finally, one day, death swings the door open and we go farther afield." "To another institution with a little more garden space?" Fred queried, pensively. Monet shrugged. "Perhaps... Who knows?" * * * * * There followed another week of idleness, and one day, as Fred Starratt was dawdling in the sun, Harrison came up to him and said: "The head waiter in the dining room at Ward Six goes out to-morrow. Would you like his job?" "Like it?" Fred found himself echoing, incredulously. "Can I begin at once ... now?" Harrison chuckled with rare good nature. "Well, to-morrow, anyway. Just report in the kitchen after breakfast." He could hardly wait for the next morning to come. He bungled things horribly at first. It looked easy enough from the side lines--bringing in the plates of steaming food, doling out sugar for the tea, passing the dishpan about at the end of the meal for the inmates to yield up their knives and forks. But after the first day Fred was swept with a healing humility. It was necessary for even the humblest occupation to be lighted with flickerings of skill. He liked setting the table best, especially in the morning after the breakfast crowd had gone. Then the sun was not yet too hot for comfort and the long dining room was bathed in a golden mist. In a corner near one of the windows a canary hopped blithely about its bobbing cage and released its soul in a flood of song. He would begin by laying the plates first, inverted, in long, precise rows. Then carefully he would group the knives and forks about them. Not only carefully, but slowly, so that the task might not be accomplished too readily. And all the time his thoughts would be flying back and forth ... back and forth, like a weaver's shuttle. At first these thoughts would pound harshly; but gradually, under the spell of his busy hands, he would find his mental process growing less and less painful, until he would wake up suddenly and find that he had been day dreaming, escaping for a time into a heaven of forgetfulness.