"But I don't understand. Do you mean to tell me that everybody has changed his name? I've changed my name back to my real name. My name is Sylvia Snow now. I changed it when I was delirious, but I shall always be Sylvia Snow. I've been thinking about it all these days while I've been lying so quiet. Did Carrier leave any message for me? He was the aviator, you know."
"He has gone back to fight for France," the nun said, crossing herself. "He was very sorry about your being so ill. You must pray for him."
"Yes, I will pray for him," Sylvia said. "And there is nobody left? Those two funny little English acrobats with fair curly hair. Have they gone?"
"They've gone, too," said the nun. "They came every day to inquire for you, and they brought you flowers, which were put beside your bed, but you were unconscious."
"I think I smelled a sweetness in the air sometimes," Sylvia said.
"They were always put outside the window at night," the nun explained.
The faintest flicker of an inclination to be amused at the nun's point of view about flowers came over Sylvia; but it scarcely endured for an instant, because it was so obviously the right point of view in this hospital, where even flowers, not to seem out of place, must acquire orderly habits. The nun asked her if she wanted anything and passed on down the ward when she shook her head.
Sylvia lay back to consider her situation and to pick up the threads of normal existence, which seemed so inextricably tangled at present that she felt like a princess in a fairy tale who had been set an impossible task by an envious witch.
In the first place, putting on one side all the extravagance of delirium, Sylvia was conscious of a change in her personality so profound and so violent, that now with the return of reason and with the impulse to renewed activity, she was convinced of her rightness in deciding to go back to her real name of Sylvia Snow. The anxiety that she had experienced during her delirium to make the change positively remained from that condition as something of value that bore no relation to the grosser terrors of hell she had experienced. The sense of regeneration that she was feeling at this moment could not entirely be explained by her mind's reaction to the peace of the hospital, in the absence of pain, and to her bodily well-being. She was able to set in its proportion each of these factors, and when she had done so there still remained this emotion that was indefinable unless she accepted for it the definition of regeneration.
"The fact is I've eaten rose leaves and I'm no longer a golden ass," she murmured. "But what I want to arrive at is when exactly I was turned into an ass and when I ate the rose leaves."