giving myself away. And then again, I thought I ought to keep awake, in case they drank so much they drank themselves into a stupor; for then I could rise and steal their keys . . .
They did not, however. Instead, they grew livelier and more noisy and red in the face, and the room grew hotter. I think that now and then I did fall into a doze: I began to hear their voices like the far-off, hollow voices you hear in dreams. Then, every so often one of them would give a shout, or snort with laughter; the others would shush her, then snort with laughter themselves—that would bring me back to myself, with a horrible jolt. At last I looked at their fat red sweating faces and their great wet open mouths, and wished I had a gun and could shoot them. They sat boasting of which ladies they had recently hurt, and how they had done it. They fell to comparing grips. They put their hands to one another''s, palm to palm, to see who had the biggest. Then one of them showed her arm.
''Let us see yours, Belinda,'' another cried then. Belinda was Nurse Bacon. They all had dainty names like that. You could imagine their mothers looking at them when they were babies, thinking they would grow up ballerinas. ''Go on, let us see it.''
Nurse Bacon pretended to look modest; then she put back her cuff. Her arm was thick as a coal-whipper''s, but white. When she bent it, it bulged. ''That''s Irish muscle,'' she said, ''come down on my grandmother''s side.'' The other nurses felt it, and whistled. Then one of them said,