"Yes. Nobody has ever had sense enough yet to ask me if there isn't something I want to tell them. They always come with their ammunition ready and it amuses me to watch them shoot wild."
"Then I qualify for 'the new angle,' for I haven't a bullet with me. Will you tell me, Dr. Mac Lean, if there's anything you want to say?"
Dr. Mary's face sobered. "Perhaps I can better show you. Come."
The next was a wonderful hour to Jean. She felt as if the doctor were going before her, tearing down walls, opening worlds she had never glimpsed. At the door of the last room, Dr. Mary paused.
"I want you to meet one of our girls. In some ways she combines all the problems we have—economic, social, educational. And there are many like her."
The doctor turned the handle and they entered a large, well-lighted room, fitted with sewing machines. A dozen dark women were busy sewing, and their laughter mingled with the whir of the machines. They all smiled and gave greetings in strange broken phrases of English, as Dr. Mary, followed by Jean, crossed to the farthest corner where a girl of nineteen was sewing furiously. She stopped and looked up, smiling.
"Well, Carmen, how's Jaime to-day?"
"Oh, so well! He get fat." The soft voice blurred the words to a single low note as the girl reached over to the wicker basket on the chair beside her. She lifted the baby and turned with radiant face to the doctor.
"See. Hees legs—so fat."
She turned back the coarse little dress and showed with pride the small shriveled legs. The doctor bent over the baby, so fragile and withered that it seemed something not new-born but something older than time, and gave a few directions in Spanish. The girl nodded and, as the baby began to whimper, buried her face in the wrinkled neck and crooned to him. Over her bowed head, the doctor's lips motioned to Jean: "Blind, but she doesn't know it yet."