Winnie spread her toes out tensely against nothing. Each time the pain came to her she seemed to know the whole world with her hips and thighs. Then she lay back exhausted, feeling knowledge ebb away in the tingling peace of relief.
When Mrs. Farley came into the room to carry away the soiled lunch tray, Winnie was unable to speak, but the shifting determined eyes of the older woman gave one quick glance and guessed what had come about.
Mrs. Farley ran out and called Dr. Beach and Mrs. Price on the telephone. Later she remembered Laurence.
Winnie was aware of the confusion in her room. She even understood that the physician and her mother were discussing whether or not she should be moved to a hospital. But in the reality of suffering their voices and faces were unreal.
If there had been no surcease Winnie could not have borne it, but just when she felt that she could endure least, pain went out of her like a quenched light, and she sank faintly as if into a memory of herself.
It had grown dark. A shaded lamp was lit. A nurse had come from the hospital and Mrs. Price and Mrs. Farley were sent out.
The nurse was a tall woman with a plump, sallow face and small confident eyes. Her nose was fat with widened nostrils that were slightly inflamed. Her peaked cap set up very high on her untidy gray hair. When she walked her starched skirt rattled like paper. She came and stood by the bedside and was harsh and still like the shadows on the wall.
Dr. Beach was a stooped, middle-aged man with a bald head and inscrutably professional eyes. In his shirt sleeves, he sat on the edge of Winnie's bed, rattling the chain on his vest or looking at his watch and coughing occasionally. Sometimes he spoke to the nurse in an undertone.
When he laid his cold hand, covered with blond hair, on Winnie's warm flesh, she shuddered to his touch. She hated the assertive hand on her, demanding her back out of pain. The heavy hand weighed down her glory and she sank back, dimmed.
The bent candle on the chest of drawers made another black bent candle behind it. On the wall, back of the row of medicine bottles, were other bottles that seemed never to have moved since the world began. The pictures had each their separate stillness of shadow. The print of the German gamekeeper floated, drowned, on the gray becalmed glass opposite. A heavy breath bellied the shade before the window, and swung it slowly inward. Then it relaxed heavily into its place against the sill.