The nurse was a tall woman with a plump, sallow face and small confident eyes. Her nose was fat with widened nostrils that were slightly inflamed. Her peaked cap set up very high on her untidy gray hair. When she walked her starched skirt rattled like paper. She came and stood by the bedside and was harsh and still like the shadows on the wall. Dr. Beach was a stooped, middle-aged man with a bald head and inscrutably professional eyes. In his shirt sleeves, he sat on the edge of Winnie's bed, rattling the chain on his vest or looking at his watch and coughing occasionally. Sometimes he spoke to the nurse in an undertone. When he laid his cold hand, covered with blond hair, on Winnie's warm flesh, she shuddered to his touch. She hated the assertive hand on her, demanding her back out of pain. The heavy hand weighed down her glory and she sank back, dimmed. The bent candle on the chest of drawers made another black bent candle behind it. On the wall, back of the row of medicine bottles, were other bottles that seemed never to have moved since the world began. The pictures had each their separate stillness of shadow. The print of the German gamekeeper floated, drowned, on the gray becalmed glass opposite. A heavy breath bellied the shade before the window, and swung it slowly inward. Then it relaxed heavily into its place against the sill. Outside the moonless night, as if choked with quiet, crowded up from the empty street. When Winnie lifted her lids a little they showed only the lower rim of the pain-flecked irises. Dr. Beach examined the purplish nails on her cold hands and felt her pulse uneasily. Suddenly Winnie clutched at the nurse's hands, and, with eyes open and unseeing, uttered shriek after shriek. The sick woman was lost in pain as in a wilderness. Her hands and feet were strange. The bed was strange. In the vast bed, so far from one end to the other, she had lost her feet. She knew there was blood on her. The world poured from her, molten. The nurse put the chloroform cap over Winnie's nose. Then her head detached itself from her body and floated over the bed. Her head danced like a golden thistle on a pool of blood. Her lightness expanded. She was vastly light. And the body in the bed in the dark pool grew still, and small, and far off. She was pale and angry with joy. But through the mist of herself, something leaped angrily upon her and dragged her to earth. Hot claws sank into her. She sank, nerveless, in the infinite darkness. She was in bed again. The vast bed stretched from side to side of the unseen sky, and oscillated like a ship. Not enough chloroform. She wanted to tell them, but they were too far away. They could not have heard. She saw the bright things in the doctor's bag. Then long claws of steel.