She went on Saturday, between two and four o'clock. An orderly wearing a corporal's bands detained her as if her hand-bag might conceal incendiary bombs, but was softened on hearing the name of Mme. de Calouas, and led her to room 74. Odette was kept a long time standing at the door of room 74; at last a doctor came out, carrying a case of instruments. He was followed by Mme. de Calouas, who said: "It is too bad, dear madame! I beg you to excuse me; one of my patients detained me. But now I am at your service; just let me change my blouse before taking you to see the wards." Her change of costume was soon made, and she took Odette to a neighboring room where a very young nurse and two military orderlies were with great difficulty holding down a patient in an attack of tetanus. The sick man's head with its contracted jaws and inflexible neck reminded her of certain "attractions" of the waxworks; the upheaved body, forming an arc from head to heels, was as rigid and unyielding as the arch of a bridge. Odette turned pale, and Mme. de Calouas said: "You lack training. See this child who is nursing him! She isn't twenty years old--a mere girl." They passed into another room, from which exhaled a pestilential odor. "Gangrene from the gas," said Mme. de Calouas. "It is not a perfume for the pocket-handkerchief, far from it! But one gets accustomed to anything. With assiduous care and absolute asepsis we have saved a certain number of wounded who suffer from this complication. We are so fortunate here as to have a surgeon who is not in haste to use the knife." In the long corridor nurses, for the most part young, were gliding or running. A priest, wearing his alb, was hastening to one of the rooms. Carried along by his speed, Mme. de Calouas entered after him, and Odette followed her. It was a comfortable hotel bedroom, hung with brightly colored paper; there were two women in white, and on a clean white bed lay a tall young man, uncovered, almost as white as the bed, from whose lips poured a stream of blood. He had received a fragment of shell in the sinus, had been operated upon that morning, and hemorrhage had set in--a stream white and red, unlike anything she had ever seen; it overwhelmed her with horror. "You should apply a tampon," said Mme. de Calouas. "The doctor is coming," replied one of the nurses. They were both leaning over the white body; one was injecting serum into the stomach, the other was applying a syringe with ipecac to the thigh. The priest was standing at the cadaverous feet, anointing them with the sacred oil. The doctor arrived and applied the proper tampons. To Mme. de Calouas this was one of the normal cases which one meets on visiting a military hospital. Odette was making every effort to stand upright. She begged to go out in the air. Mme. de Calouas smiled. "It is war! And we are only in one of the rear hospitals. There is no rain of shells here. Shall we visit the wards down-stairs, if you please?"