"Dear me, dear me, what a dreadful place!" he kept ejaculating, as he followed Lady Atalanta, carrying her bags of oranges and rolls, among the vociferating, grabbing beldames in bed, and the indifferent nuns and serving wenches toiling about noisily: Lady Tal going methodically her way, businesslike, cheerful, giving to one some snuff, to another an orange or a book, laughing, joking in her bad Italian, settling the creatures' disagreeable bed-clothes and pillows for them, as if instead of cosseting dying folk, she was going round to the counters of some huge shop. A most painful exhibition, thought Marion. "I say, suppose you talk to her, she's a nice little commonplace creature who wanted to be a school-mistress and is awfully fond of reading novels--tell her--I don't know how to explain it--that you write novels. See, Teresina, this gentleman and I are writing a book together, all about a lady who married a silly husband--would you like to hear about it?" Stroking the thin white face, with the wide forget-me-not eyes, of the pretty, thin little blonde, Lady Tal left Marion, to his extreme discomfort, seated on the edge of a straw chair by the side of the bed, a bag of oranges on his knees and absolutely no ideas in his head. "She is so good," remarked the little girl, opening and shutting a little fan which Lady Tal had just given her, "and so beautiful. Is she your sister? She told me she had a brother whom she was very fond of, but I thought he was dead. She's like an angel in Paradise." "Precisely, precisely," answered Marion, thinking at the same time what an uncommonly uncomfortable place Paradise must, in that case, be. All this was not at all what he had imagined when he had occasionally written about young ladies consoling the sick; this businesslike, bouncing, cheerful shake-up-your-pillows and shake-up-your-soul mode of proceeding. Lady Tal, he decided within himself, had emphatically no soul; all he had just witnessed, proved it. "Why do you do it?" he suddenly asked, as they emerged from the hospital cloisters. He knew quite well: merely because she was so abominably active. "I don't know. I like ill folk. I'm always so disgustingly well myself; and you see with my poor brother, I'd got accustomed to ill folk, so I suppose I can't do without. I should like to settle in England--if it weren't for all those hateful relations of mine and of my husband's--and go and live in the East End and look after sick creatures. At least I think I should; but I know I shouldn't." "Why not?" asked Marion.