"Is this discussion worth while?" Sylvia asked, wearily.
"Am I ever to be allowed to get to sleep?" Madame Benzer demanded.
"I should like to sleep, too," protested the masseuse. "If I'm to get strong enough to resume work in November, I need all the sleep I can get. I'm not like a child that can sleep through anything."
"I'm not asleep," cried Claudinette, shrilly. "And I'm very content that I'm not asleep. I adore to hear people talking in the night."
The nun begged for general silence, and the ward was stilled. Sylvia lay awake in a rage, listening to Madame Benzer and the masseuse while they turned over and over with sighs and groans and much creaking of their beds. At last, however, all except herself fell asleep; their united breathing seemed like the breathing of a large and placid beast. Behind the screens in that dim golden mist the pages of the nun's breviary whispered now instead of Miss Savage; the lamp before the image of the Virgin sometimes flickered and cast upon the insipid face subtle shadows that gave humanity to what by daylight looked like a large pale-blue fondant.
"Or should I say 'divinity'?" Sylvia asked herself.
She lay on her side staring at the image, which was the conventional representation of Our Lady of Lourdes with eyes upraised and hands clasped to heaven. Contemplated thus, the tawdry figure really acquired a supplicatory grace, and in the night, the imagination, dwelling upon this form, began to identify itself with the attitude and to follow those upraised eyes toward an unearthly quest. Sylvia turned over on her other side with a perfectly conscious will not to be influenced externally by what she felt was an unworthy appeal. But when she had turned over she could not stay averted from the image; a restless curiosity to know if it was still upon its bracket seized her, and she turned back to her contemplation.
"How ridiculous all those stories are of supernatural winkings and blinkings!" she thought. "Why, I could very easily imagine the most acrobatic behavior by that pathetic little blue figure. And yet it has expressed the aspirations of millions of wounded hearts."
The thought was overwhelming: the imagination of what this figure reduplicated innumerably all over the earth had stood for descended upon Sylvia from the heart of the darkness about her, and she shuddered with awe.
"If I scoff at that," she thought, "I scoff at human tears. And why shouldn't I scoff at human tears? Because I should be scoffing at my own tears. And why not at my own?"