“Hell of a mess, isn’t it?”

Twenty-two took up again gloomily the book he was reading, which was on Diseases of the Horse, from the hospital library.  He was in the midst of Glanders.

He had, during most of that day, been making up his mind to let his family know where he was.  He did not think they cared, particularly.  He had no illusions about that.  But there was something about Jane Brown which made him feel like doing the decent thing.  It annoyed him frightfully, but there it was.  She was so eminently the sort of person who believed in doing the decent thing.

So, about seven o’clock, he had sent the orderly out for stamps and paper.  He imagined that Jane Brown would not think writing home on hospital stationery a good way to break bad news.  But the orderly had stopped for a chat at the engine house, and had ended by playing a game of dominoes.  When, at ten o’clock, he had returned to the hospital entrance, the richer by a quarter and a glass of beer, he had found a strange policeman on the hospital steps, and the doors locked.

The quarantine was on.

Now there are different sorts of quarantines.  There is the sort where a trained nurse and the patient are shut up in a room and bath, and the family only opens the door and peers in.  And there is the sort where the front door has a placard on it, and the family goes in and out the back way, and takes a street-car to the office, the same as usual.  And there is the hospital quarantine, which is the real thing, because hospitals are expected to do things thoroughly.

So our hospital was closed up as tight as a jar of preserves.  There were policemen at all the doors, quite suddenly.  They locked the doors and put the keys in their pockets, and from that time on they opened them only to pass things in, such as newspapers or milk or groceries or the braver members of the Staff.  But not to let anything out—­except the Staff.  Supposedly Staffs do not carry germs.

And, indeed, even the Staff was not keen about entering.  It thought of a lot of things it ought to do about visiting time, and prescribed considerably over the telephone.

At first there was a great deal of confusion, because quite a number of people had been out on various errands when it happened.  And they came back, and protested to the office that they had only their uniforms on under their coats, and three dollars; or their slippers and no hats.  Or that they would sue the city.  One or two of them got quite desperate and tried to crawl up the fire-escape, but failed.

This is of interest chiefly because it profoundly affected Jane Brown.  Miss McAdoo, her ward nurse, had debated whether to wash her hair that evening, or to take a walk.  She had decided on the walk, and was therefore shut out, along with the Junior Medical, the kitchen cat, the Superintendent’s mother-in-law and six other nurses.

The next morning the First Assistant gave Jane Brown charge of H ward.