“Right on time, aren’t you?”
The girl laughed merrily.
Rose threw her head to one side and inquired, “And supper will be along in a minute?”
“Yes, mam. I’m going to begin bringing it in, right now.”
Rose sat erect and wrung her wash cloth out and ran it over her small face. The water felt good. She wrung it again and laid it behind her ears. That felt good, too. She took a small comb from her hand bag and slid it through her short black hair. Then she wrung the cloth out carefully, folded it as she had been taught to do when a pupil nurse, and brushed her teeth into the basin.
This was nice. It was fun being in bed in a ward of perfectly strange women, rather than in a stuffy infirmary with six or seven nurses talking shop and telling jokes all the time. She looked down the ward at the rows of beds, and the glass partition which separated them from the other fourteen beds; at the place where the partition stopped in the center of the ward to create an aisle and then at the white beds beyond. Through the far windows was a perfectly glorious sunset, and out of her own window just the feathery beginning of new leaves upon an old tree.
She had never seen the ward from this angle. It was really a very pretty sight, when viewed from bed and with nothing to do. Perhaps it was because she had been through so much emotionally today that it looked especially pretty. Things did, after such days.
Or perhaps it was because she wasn’t rushing to get everything in order before the duty changes, rushing to remember this and do that. For once her day was ending with the sun’s setting.
It was a good feeling. She stretched her toes and the covers swelled with her rising breasts. And now in a few minutes supper would be along.
The ward was full of chatter, but she didn’t hear it. A voluptuous relaxation was upon her. In bed. At sunset. Awaiting supper, and watching the ugly faces of old women bloom, with the softening light ... and the new leaves on the tree taking on that clear green which hurt.