It was decided that Georgia was to have a bed in a ward at eight dollars a week. Private rooms were twenty-five and they couldn't afford that during the month she would be laid up, particularly since her pay would stop automatically after her third day of absence. The office rule was very strict on that point.
She sat limply in the waiting room while Al was attending to her registration and her mother was upstairs with the nurse unpacking her things. On the opposite wall were a couple of windows, sharply framing vistas into the park across the street, and she saw two fragments of the path where she had often walked on Sunday mornings with Stevens.
It was this same wall in front of her which had seemed so sullen gray and prison-color from the other side and which had sometimes turned their talk to sombre things—death and immortality. From the inside, as she now saw it, the wall was not gray but cheerfully reddish brown, patterned vertically like a thrasher's wing.
Two pictures hung by the window, of the pope and of Frances Xavier Cabrini, founder of the order of nuns that conducted the hospital. They were photographs, she thought, or reproductions from photographs.
She looked closely at them, first at the old man, then at the old woman. She saw in them more than she had ever seen in such pictures before. They offered at least one positive answer to the riddle, perhaps the safest answer for such as she—to submit oneself through one's lifetime so as to attain at the end of it the matchless serenity of those two untroubled faces.
It came to her then in a moment of more than natural revelation, as it seemed, that she must seek the peace which these two had found.
She crossed slowly to the desk in the corner, to write what she knew might be the last of the thousands of letters she had written.
My dear, she began on the hospital paper, I am here with, not to cause him anxiety in the beginning of his great enterprise, a touch of the grip. Nothing serious. In haste and headache. Georgia.
She paused. Even if it must end by her giving him up, she loved him. Should she, by an omission so significant, upset and distress him and perhaps hinder him in a task which, well performed, would bring great things to him, if never now to her! I love you, she added, always.
A second note she dated a week forward. My dear, I haven't pulled around again as soon as I expected, but the rest has done me a world of good. Don't worry about me—they say I've a constitution like a horse. For my sake, make good, Mason—you've got to. With love, lots of it, always, G.