She was wet, very wet, sopping—I could smell the reek of cloth—and very, very shabby. I knew the dress she was wearing—a blue coat and skirt. We chose it together at Bradley’s . . . ages ago. Her little hat was a ruin, and her toes were thrusting out of the wreck of a shoe. Her gloves were awful. One tress of her lovely hair was half-way down, and her face was pinched and peaked with two splashes of dusky red about her cheekbones.
I rang for Mason and told him to send a maid to warm my bed and light a fire in the room: after that, to summon a doctor. Then I picked up Jo, still talking, and carried her up the stairs. . . .
All that I did she suffered, just as one suffers the barber to cut one’s hair. She took no notice at all of anything, except that now and again she caught my cheek to hers. But she coughed and chattered—nonsense, without a break.
By the time the doctor was there, I’d got her out of the bath and into bed.
He said that she had pneumonia and sent for nurses and drugs.
By eleven o’clock the women had taken over, and all that treatment can do was being done. . . .
Till a quarter past seven this morning I hardly left her side.
At half-past eleven the medicine took some effect, and from then for nearly an hour she never spoke. Then she started again—not chattering any longer, but speaking sterner stuff. The scene had changed.
She talked in a low voice, off and on, right through the night. The cough interfered and her breathing troubled her sorely, but she would talk.
And this, pieced fairly together, is what she said.