“That’s the way, dearie. That’s the way,” said Mrs. Perkins, gritting her own teeth in sympathy and smoothing back the hair from the patient’s brow. Edwin and Boyce were debating as to whether it were worth while staying when a messenger from the hospital arrived from below to say that Mrs. Hadley, Boyce’s patient of the afternoon, was “took worse,” and so Edwin was left alone once more in the squalor of the patient’s room. He sat waiting in a chair that was supposed to be easy, listening to the conversation of the woman and her nurse. Most of it was family history of a scandalous kind, and the manner of its expression was extremely frank. In the course of his hospital work he had never before realised the extraordinary contradictions of the code by which the talk of the working-class is governed. In its mixture of delicacies and blatancies it amazed him. Both the women were fluent gossips, and the conversation never ceased, except in those moments of acute and sudden tension when the patient’s hands clutched at her towel and the midwife mopped her brow. Then, when the upstairs room was silent, a murmur of laughter and loud voices would come up the stairs from below. In this family, at any rate, the occasion of a birth did not lack celebration. Even the patient was curious about what was happening downstairs. “What’s our Susan doing?” she said from time to time. An interminable business. As the night wore on it grew very chilly, and Edwin shivered in his chair. The case hung fire unaccountably, and in this, the first of many such cold vigils, he fell into a strange mood, often to be repeated, in which the sublime influences of night and solitude combined to purge his reflections of pettiness and showed him what an unimaginable mystery his own life was. The patient fell into an uneasy doze. The midwife nodded in her chair, snatching up her head with a conscious jerk whenever it lolled over her fat bosom. The smelly oil-lamp on the mantelpiece gave an occasional sputter when a drop of water was sucked up into the wick. In the room below the excited talk had petered out and only a sound of soft snoring was heard, like the breathing of cows in a byre.