Instead of waiting until Nelly could be summoned, I followed the mildly
disapproving boy up a great, white stairway, past groups of girls, some in
bright silk waists and some in college gowns. Even in the farthest corner
remote from the hubbub, a musical echo blent of gay talk and laughter
filled the air; a light body of sound that the walls held and gave out as
a continuous murmur.

A second time piping, "What name, Sir?" Mercury opened the door of a large
room with many windows. At the far corner my eyes sought out Helen in
conversation with a keen-eyed, weazened little man, at sight of whom the
boy took to his heels.

Three women besides Helen were in the room, bunched at a table that ran
along two sides under the windows. They wore big checked aprons, and one
of them squinted into her microscope under a fur cap. Wide-mouthed jars,
empty or holding dirty water, stood on other tables ranged up and down the
middle of the room, and there was a litter of porcelain-lined trays, test
tubes, pipettes, glass stirring-rods and racks for microscope slides.

Against the wall to the left were cabinets with sliding doors, showing
retorts, apparatus, bottles of drugs, jars of specimens and large,
coloured models of flowers and of the lower marine forms. Against the
right hand wall were sinks, an incubator and, beyond, a door leading into
a drug closet. There was the usual laboratory smell, in which the
penetrating fume of alcohol, the smokiness of creosote and carbolic acid,
the pungency of oil of clove and the aroma of Canada balsam struggled for
the mastery.

In her college gown Helen looked more like herself than the day before and