He stood irresolute. "I never bin in one of them, and I don't want to make a start."
"Its bad luck to be our name," called out Smiff, waving his amputated ankle. "Better get your hand in!"
Mr. Smith got in slowly and departed from the ward, sitting bolt upright, gripping the sides with his hands.
Some of the wards and the Sisters' bunks are charming at this time of the year, now that larkspur and rambler-roses are cheap in the market.
But the love of decoration is not woman's alone. Through the dispensary hatchway I saw three empty poison-bottles, each with a poppy stuck in its neck.
Everything in the dispensary is beautiful—its glasses, its flames, its brass weights, its jars and globes; but much more beautiful because it is half a floor higher than the corridor in which we stand and look up into it, through a hatchway in the wall. There is something in that: one feels like Gulliver.
No woman has ever been into this bachelors' temple.
On tapping at a small square panel set in the wall of the corridor the panel flies up and a bachelor is seen from the waist to the knees. If he feels well and my smile is humble he will stoop, and I see looking down at me a small worn face and bushy eyebrows, or a long ascetic face and bleached hair, or a beard and a pair of bearded nostrils.
Between them the three old things, priests in their way, measure and weigh and mix and scold and let up the panel and bang it down through the long day, filling the hospital with their coloured bottles, sealed packets of pills, jars and vaccines, and precious syringes in boxes marked "To be returned at once" (I never knew a Sister fail to toss her head when she saw this message).