been committed. Marriage had not made her into a woman; it had driven
her back into an arrested youth. It was as though she ought to have worn
short skirts and her hair in a long braid down her back. Hers was the
body of a young boy. When she was free from pain, and the colour had
come back to her cheeks a little, she smiled at him, and was about to put
out her hand as a child might to a brother or a father, when suddenly a
shadow stole into her eyes and crept across her face, and she drew her
clenched hand close to her body. Still, she tried to smile at him.

His quiet, impersonal, though friendly look soothed her.

"Am I very sick?" she asked.

He shook his head and smiled. "You'll be all right to-morrow, I hope."

"That's too bad. I would like to be so sick that I couldn't think of
anything else. My father used to say that the world was only the size of
four walls to a sick person."

"I can't promise you so small a world," remarked the Young Doctor with a
kind smile, his arm resting on the side of the bed, his chair drawn
alongside. "You will have to face the whole universe to-morrow, same as
ever."

She looked perplexed, and then said to him: "I used to think it was a
beautiful world, and they try to make me think it is yet; but it isn't."

"Who try to make you?" he asked.

"Oh, my bird Richard, and Nigger the black cat, and Jumbo, the dog," she