One Wednesday morning someone in the third-floor-back must have been very ill. There was a sweetish, etheric odor in the house, and Mrs. McMurtry hurried back and forth with ice packs and blankets. A narrow black doctor with a narrow black bag oozed up through the halls. A group of the kimono-clad women gathered at the end of the hall, bleating like frightened quail. One of them had left her door open. The room was papered in light red, the drawn shades were green, and four of the jets on a very ornate center chandelier were burning. An imitation tapestry of nude Leda and her swan hung over the mantel. A man was seated on the side of the wide bed, bending to lace his shoes. Mrs. McMurtry, passing with a bowl of cracked ice, leaned in to close that door hurriedly. Then she shooed away the girls. They scattered like doves off of crumbs. One of them, trailing the edge of her light sateen kimono in the pool of Bertha's scrub water so that it slapped against her bare legs, glanced down with a kick and an oath. It was Helga. *** Helga was so thin! And pretty. A delicate, convalescent kind of prettiness, as if she had been ill a long while, and her hands had whitened and her skin softened and her eye sockets were like enormous pans with a jewel in them. This soft-handed Helga whose wrists used to crack open from chapping and bleed until she cried! "Helga!" "Fortheluvvaga! So help me--it's the lump! Bertha!" Pretty, pretty Helga, with her brown hair frizzed and her face full of pink light from the sateen kimono. Bertha on her knees, with her hands dripping the sloppy water, could only sit back on her heels and stare her fill. "Helga, you remember me?" "You're the square head from Farley's. You're the quitter walked off one breakfast time and left us cold. If it ain't old Berth!" She began to cry, for all the world like a convalescent too weak to know quite why. "It's old Berth--still scrubbing." "You're so pretty, Helga--that way." "And you're so white, Berth. Still like a white old tomb, you, sittin' on the world, listening to it." "You don't work no more, Helga? You're so fine. Helga--Helga--you ain't----" "Yes--I am! Oh I work all right, I work! Come in my room." "Mrs. McMurtry won't like that!" "The hell Mrs. McMurtry won't. I don't owe her nothing. She does all the owing there is around here. I don't owe her nothing. Not even an apology." Helga's room was papered in light green and there was an atrocity of a great green satin bow, sprawled like a spider, pinned on the lace curtains. The shades were drawn against the relenting spring sunshine and the gas jets sang. A brass bed and a base burner and a carpet with an enormous floral wreath crowded up the room. Between the windows was a full-length repetition of the tapestry of the nude Leda and her Swan.