see her once again, to insist that he had always loved her, had never for a second loved anybody else or looked at anybody else.  In the laboratory he was conscious only of a decayed object preserved in a bottle of yellowing alcohol.  It made him very sick, but he could not take his eyes from it.  He was more aware of it than of waiting.  His mind floated in abeyance, coming back always to that horrible bottle.  To escape it he opened the door to the right, hoping to find a sane and business-like office.  He realized that he was looking into the operating-room; in one glance he took in Dr. Dilling, strange in white gown and bandaged head, bending over the steel table with its screws and wheels, then nurses holding basins and cotton sponges, and a swathed thing, just a lifeless chin and a mound of white in the midst of which was a square of sallow flesh with a gash a little bloody at the edges, protruding from the gash a cluster of forceps like clinging parasites.

He shut the door with haste.  It may be that his frightened repentance of the night and morning had not eaten in, but this dehumanizing interment of her who had been so pathetically human shook him utterly, and as he crouched again on the high stool in the laboratory he swore faith to his wife . . . to Zenith . . . to business efficiency . . . to the Boosters’ Club . . . to every faith of the Clan of Good Fellows.

Then a nurse was soothing, “All over!  Perfect success!  She’ll come out fine!  She’ll be out from under the anesthetic soon, and you can see her.”

He found her on a curious tilted bed, her face an unwholesome yellow but her purple lips moving slightly.  Then only did he really believe that she was alive.  She was muttering.  He bent, and heard her sighing, “Hard get real maple syrup for pancakes.”  He laughed inexhaustibly; he beamed on the nurse and proudly confided, “Think of her talking about maple syrup!  By golly, I’m going to go and order a hundred gallons of it, right from Vermont!”

II

She was out of the hospital in seventeen days.  He went to see her each afternoon, and in their long talks they drifted back to intimacy.  Once he hinted something of his relations to Tanis and the Bunch, and she was inflated by the view that a Wicked Woman had captivated her poor George.

If once he had doubted his neighbors and the supreme charm of the Good Fellows, he was convinced now.  You didn’t, he noted, “see Seneca Doane coming around with any flowers or dropping in to chat with the Missus,” but Mrs. Howard Littlefield brought to the hospital her priceless wine jelly (flavored with real wine); Orville Jones spent hours in picking out the kind of novels Mrs. Babbitt liked—­nice love stories about New York millionaries and Wyoming cowpunchers; Louetta Swanson knitted a pink bed-jacket; Sidney Finkelstein and his merry brown-eyed flapper of a wife selected the prettiest nightgown in all the stock of Parcher and Stein.