There was a restless air about the Refuge. In a few minutes the friends of the patients would be admitted. The incurables would hear the latest gossip of the Ghetto, for the world was still very much with these abortive lives, avid of sensations, Jewish to the end. It was an unpretentious institution--two corner houses knocked together--near the east lung of London; supported mainly by the poor at a penny a week, and scarcely recognized by the rich, so that paraplegia and vertigo and rachitis and a dozen other hopeless diseases knocked hopelessly at its narrow portals. But it was a model institution all the same, and the patients lacked for nothing except freedom from pain. There was even a miniature synagogue for their spiritual needs, with the women’s compartment religiously railed off from the men’s, as if these grotesque ruins of sex might still distract each other’s devotions. Yet the rabbis knew human nature. The sprightly hydrocephalous paralytic, Leah, had had the chair she inhabited carried down into the men’s sitting-room to beguile the moments, and was smiling fascinatingly upon the deaf blind man who had the Braille Bible at his fingers’ ends, and read on as stolidly as St. Anthony. Mad Mo had strolled vacuously into the ladies’ ward, and, indifferent to the pretty, white-aproned Christian nurses, was loitering by the side of a weird, hatchet-faced cripple, with a stiletto-shaped nose supporting big spectacles. Like most of the patients, she was up and dressed. Only a few of the white pallets ranged along the walls were occupied. “Leah says she’d be quite happy if she could walk like you,” said Mad Mo, in complimentary tones. “She always says Milly walks so beautiful. She says you can walk the whole length of the garden.” Milly, huddled in her chair, smiled miserably. “You’re crying again, Rachel,” protested a dark-eyed, bright-faced dwarf, in excellent English, as she touched her friend’s withered hand. “You are in the blues again. Why, that page is all blistered.” “No, I feel so nice,” said the sad-eyed Russian in her quaint, musical accent, “You sall not tink I cry because I am not happy. When I read sad tings--like my life--den only I am happy.” The dwarf gave a short laugh that made her pendant earrings oscillate. “I thought you were brooding over your love affairs,” she said. “Me!” cried Rachel. “I lost too young my leg to be in love. No, it is Psalm lxxxviii that I brood over. ‘I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up.’ Yes, I was only a girl when I had to go to Königsberg to find a doctor to cut off my leg. ‘Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.’” Her face shone ecstatic. “Hush!” whispered the dwarf, with a warning nudge and a slight nod in the direction of a neighboring waterbed, on which a pale, rigid, middle-aged woman lay with shut, sleepless eyes. “Se cannot understand Englis,” said the Russian girl, proudly.