They laughed and adjusted themselves, and then they were quiet again, watching her intently.
She sat down in the big chair and rocked a little.
"Let me see—" She sat smiling thoughtfully; the smile ran along the pillows—waiting.
"Once when I was a little girl——"
The pillows nestled a little and sighed happily and settled down; and Aunt Jane's voice went on with the tale and the nurse at the end of the ward passed out with her dish. The door swung to behind her.
The great sunny room was left to happiness and to Aunt Jane and to the children and: "Once when I was a little girl."
[XI]
In Suite A, Herman Medfield had eaten the last of his breakfast. It might almost be said that, sitting in the window with the paper spread before him and the sun shining in, he had enjoyed his breakfast.... It was a long time since Herman Medfield had eaten a complete breakfast served in the ordinary way. The road to the House of Mercy was strewn with a vast wreckage of fads and hopes and breakfast foods. There were long vegetarian streaks that excluded milk and eggs; and gusts of Fletcherizing—chewing wind hopefully and patiently; and there were wide negative deserts—forbidden fruits—no starches-and-sweets together, no sweets-and-acids, no potato-and-meat, no proteids-and-carbons. A long, weary, hopeless watching and coaxing of gastric juices, and infinite patience and cunning toward the vagaries of indigestion. He had "rolled the stomach gently," and he had lain with "a pillow under his back and head down." He had become a finical, peripatetic amphitheatre of constant, cautious experiment and investigation. And it had brought him at last to Suite A and the sunny window.