"Here we are, at the minor operating-room," said Miss Lindström, pausing. "It's against the rules, but if you want to look from across the room--just to say you've been there--" She held the door open a little, a suffocating odor of anaesthetics blew out in their faces, like a breath from a dragon's cave. Mrs. Marshall and Judith stepped forward. But Sylvia clutched at her mother's arm and whispered: "Mother! Mother! I don't think I'll go on. I feel--I feel--I'll go back down to the entrance hall to wait." Mrs. Marshall nodded a preoccupied assent, and Sylvia fled away down the endless corridor, looking neither to the right nor the left, down repeated flights of scrubbed and sterilized marble stairs, into the entrance hall, and, like a bolt from a bow, out of it on the other side, out into the street, into the sunshine, the heat, the clatter, the blessed, blessed smell of cabbage and dish-water.... After a time she went to sit down on the top step of the hospital entrance to wait. She contemplated with exquisite enjoyment the vigorous, profane, hair-pulling quarrel between two dirty little savages across the street. She could have kissed her hand to the loud-voiced woman who came scuffling to the window to scold them, clutching a dirty kimono together over a Hogarth-like expanse of bosom. They were well, these people, blood ran in their veins, their skin was whole, they breathed air, not iodoform! Her mother had pulled the string too tight, and Sylvia's ears were full of the ugly twang of its snapping. When, at last, Judith and Mrs. Marshall came out, hand-in-hand, Sylvia sprang up to say: "What an _awful_ place! I hope I'll never have to set foot in one again!" But quick as was her impulse to speech, her perceptions were quicker, and before the pale exaltation of the other two, she fell silent, irritated, rebellious, thoroughly alien. They walked along in silence. Then Judith said, stammering a little with emotion, "M-M-Mother, I want to b-b-b-be a trained n-n-nurse when I grow up." CHAPTER XIII AN INSTRUMENT IN TUNE As they drew near to their boarding-house late that afternoon, very hot, very crumpled, very solemn, and very much out of tune with one another, they were astonished to see a little eager-faced boy dash out of the house and run wildly to meet them, shouting as he came. "Why, Lawrence _Marshall_!" cried his mother, picking him up in strong arms; "how ever in the world did you get here!" "Father brungded me," cried the child, clasping her tightly around the neck. "We got so lonesome for Mother we couldn't wait."