"Give it me," said the white nurse. "I'll see to it for you, Mrs. Grig, as I go home."

 

She looked up at the nurse, and the nurse, eyes no longer laughing, looked down at her. The nurse knew everything, and, moreover, must have assisted at scores of tragedies; yet Lilian regarded her as an innocent who understood nothing essential in life. Her comforting kiss was like the kiss of a very capable child pretending to be grown up.

 

Voices in the other bedroom! The doctor had arrived and was talking to the second nurse. They went in together. Felix lay a changed man, horribly aged³. He was a man who had suddenly learned that in order to live it was necessary to breathe, and that breathing may be an intensely difficult operation of mechanics. His lined, wrinkled face was drawn⁴ with the awful anxieties incident to breathing, and with the acute pain in both lungs. The enemy was growing in strength and Felix was losing strength, but he could not surrender. He must continue to struggle, despite the odds⁵, and there was no referee⁶ to stop the fight, either on the ground that it had developed into an assassination⁷ or on any other ground. The brutality⁸ had to proceed. And the sun streamed through the window; and outside, from the promenade⁹ where the idlers were strolling and the band was playing, the window looked exactly the same as all the other windows of the enormous hotel.

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