“Listen!” said Lord Robert. “I am here ostensibly as the guest of the visiting physician, don't you know, but really in the interests of the little friend I told you of.”
“The one I got the tickets for last week?”
“Precisely.”
At the next moment they were in the ballroom. It was the lecture theatre for the students of the hospital school—a building detached from the wards and of circular shape, with a gallery round its walls, which were festooned with flags and roofed with a glass dome. Some two hundred girls and as many men were gathered there; the pit was their dancing ring and the gallery was their withdrawing room. The men were nearly all students of the medical schools; the girls were nearly all nurses, and they wore their uniform: There was not one jaded face among them, not one weary look or tired expression. They were in the fulness of youth and the height of vigour. The girls laughed with the ring of joy, their eyes sparkled with the light of happiness, their cheeks glowed with the freshness of health.
The two men stood a moment and looked on.
“Well, what do you think of it?” said Lord Robert.
Drake's wide eyes were ablaze, and his voice came in gusts.
“Think of it!” he said. “It's wonderful! It's glorious!”
Lord Robert's glass had dropped from his eye, and he was laughing in his drawling way.
“What are you laughing at? Women like these are at least natural, and Nature can not be put on.”