from my gums, to answer,
''I ain''t Mrs Rivers!''
And he had gone, before I said it.
My head grew clearer as the day wore on, though. I lay on my bed and tried to think. They made us keep to our rooms in the
morning, and we were meant to sit and be silent—or to read, if we liked—while Nurse Bacon watched. But I think what books there were in the house, the ladies had already read; for they only, like me, lay upon their beds, doing nothing, and it was Nurse Bacon who sat, with her feet put up on a stool, looking over the pages of a little magazine—now and then licking one of her fat red fingers, to turn a page; and now and then chuckling.
And then, at twelve, she put the magazine away and gave a great yawn, and took us downstairs for our dinners. Another nurse came to help her. ''Come on, come on,'' they said. ''No dawdling.''
We walked in a line. The pale old lady—Miss Wilson—pressed close at my back.
''Don''t be frightened,'' she said, ''of— Don''t turn your head! Hush! Hush!'' I felt her breath on my neck. ''Don''t be frightened,'' she said, ''of your soup.''
Then I walked faster, to be nearer Nurse Bacon.
She led us to the dining-room. They were ringing a bell there, and as we went our line was joined by other nurses, with ladies from the rooms they watched in. I should say there were sixty or so ladies kept in that house; and they seemed to me now, after my spell in the pads, a vast and horrible crowd. They were dressed as I was—I mean badly, in all sorts of fashions; and this—and the fact that some had had their hair cut to their heads; and some had lost teeth, or had their teeth taken from them; and some had cuts and bruises, and others wore canvas bracelets or muffs—this made them look queerer than perhaps they really were. I''m not saying they weren''t all mad, in their own fashions; and to me, just then, they looked mad as horse-flies. But there are as many different ways of being mad, after all, as there are of being crooked. Some were perfect maniacs. Two or three, like Betty, were only simpletons. One liked to shout bad words. Another threw fits. The rest were only miserable: they walked, with their eyes on the floor, and sat and turned their hands in their laps, and mumbled, and sighed.