If Kirk had spoken his mind he would have said that of all the ghastly nurseries the human brain could have conceived this was the ghastliest. It was a large, square room, and to Kirk’s startled eyes had much the appearance of an operating theatre at a hospital.
There was no carpet on the tiled floor. The walls, likewise tiled, were so bare that the eye ached contemplating them. In the corner by the window stood the little white cot. Beside it on the wall hung a large thermometer. Various knobs of brass decorated the opposite wall. At the farther end of the room was a bath, complete with shower and all the other apparatus of a modern tub.
It was probably the most horrible room in all New York.
“Well, what do you think of it?” demanded Ruth proudly.
Kirk gazed at her, speechless. This, he said to himself, was Ruth, his wife, who had housed his son in the spare bedroom of the studio and allowed a shaggy Irish terrier to sleep on his bed; who had permitted him to play by the hour in the dust of the studio floor, who had even assisted him to do so by descending into the dust herself in the role of a bear or a snake.
What had happened to this world from which he had been absent but one short year? Was everybody mad, or was he hopelessly behind the times?
“Well?” Ruth reminded him.
Kirk eyed the dreadful room.
“It looks clean,” he said at last.
“It is clean,” said the voice of Lora Delane Porter proudly behind him. She had followed them up the stairs to do the honours of the nursery, the centre of her world. “It is essentially clean. There is not an object in that room which is not carefully sterilized night and morning with a weak solution of boric acid!”