Fred threw his burden on Monet’s bed.  The youth gave a low whistle of delight.

“Pall Malls!” he cried, incredulously.  “Where did you get them?”

“They came from my wife.”

“Oh! ...  Don’t you want any of them?”

“No.”

At the smoking hour Fred saw Monet take out his pitiful little bag of cheap tobacco and roll the usual cigarette.

“What? ...  Aren’t you smoking Pall Malls?” he asked, with a shade of banter in his voice.

Monet shook his head.  “I don’t want them, either...  What shall we do?  Give them to the others?”

Fred stared through a sudden mist.  “Why—­yes.  Just whatever you like.”

That night, when everyone else was asleep, Fred Starratt told Felix Monet his story...

CHAPTER XIV

One morning, at the beginning of the second week of Fred Starratt’s stay at Fairview, as he and Monet were swinging back to lunch after a brisk walk, they received orders to fall in line with the inmates of Ward 6.

“Things will be better now,” Monet said, with his usual air of quiet reassurance.

And so it proved.

Fred’s first introduction was to the dining room.  It was not an extraordinary place, and yet Fred gave a little gasp as he entered it and stood staring almost foolishly at the tables set with clean linen.  Three of its sides were made up almost entirely of windows, before which the shades were drawn to shut out the hot noonday sun, and its floor of polished hardwood glistened even in the subdued light.  They sat down in the first seats that came to hand, and it was not until some cold meat was passed that Fred discovered a knife and fork at his place.  The meat was neither choice nor dainty, but somehow just the fact of this knife and fork gave it extraordinary zest.  Later on, small pats of butter were circulated and a spoonful of sugar apiece for the tea.  And once again he listened to people talk while they ate ... heard a subdued, but sane, laugh or two...  There was a smoking room also, not overlarge, but adequate.

The inmates of Ward 6, from whom Fred had stood aloof, welcomed him warmly.  He was at a loss to know why until Monet explained.

“It’s the cigarettes.”

“Ah, then you distributed them here?  I thought they went to the other poor devils.”

The youth turned a wistful glance toward him.  “I knew you’d get over to this place finally ... and I wanted them to like you...”

Fred fell silent over the implied rebuke.

The dormitories were large and light and airy and scrupulously clean, but the usual institutional chill pervaded everything...  Yet, for a season, Fred Starratt found all discrimination smothered in his reaction to normal sights and sounds.  But, after a day or two, the same human adaptability that had made him accept the life in Ward 1 as a matter of course rose to the new environment and occasion.