geon after all.
I shuddered and slowed my step, then almost stumbled. The india-rubber boots were hard to walk in.
''Come on,'' said Nurse Spiller, giving me a prod.
''Which do we want?'' asked the other nurse, looking at the doors.
''Fourteen. Here we are.''
All the doors had little plates screwed to them. We stopped at one of them, and Nurse Spiller gave a knock, then put a key to the lock and turned it. The key was a plain one, shined from use. She kept it on a chain inside her pocket.
The room she took us into was not a proper room, but had been made, by the building of a wooden wall, inside another.—For, as I said, that house had been all chopped up and made crazy. The wooden wall had glass at the top, that let in light from a window beyond it, but the room had no window of its own. The air was close. There were four beds in it, along with a cot where a nurse slept. Three of the beds had women beside them, getting dressed. One bed was bare.
''This is to be yours,'' said Nurse Spiller, taking me to it. It was placed very near the nurse''s cot. ''This is where we puts our questionable ladies. Try a queer trick here, Nurse Bacon shall know all about it. Shan''t you, Nurse Bacon?''
This was the nurse of that room. ''Oh, yes,'' she said. She nodded and rubbed her hands. She had some ailment that made her fingers very fat and pink, like sausages—an unlucky ailment, I suppose, for someone with a name like hers—and she liked to rub them often. She looked me over in the same cool way that all the other nurses had, and she said, as they had,