Then, too, she began to learn that hospitals had limitations.  Jane Brown’s hospital had no social worker.  Much as she loved the work, the part that the hospital could not do began to hurt her.  Before the quarantine women with new babies had gone out, without an idea of where to spend the night.  Ailing children had gone home to such places as she could see from the dormitory windows, where the work the hospital had begun could not be finished.

From the roof of the building at night she looked out over a city that terrified her.  The call of a playing child in the street began to sound to her like the shriek of accident.  The very grinding of the trolley cars, the smoke of the mills, began to mean the operating room.  She thought a great deal, those days, about the little town she had come from, with its peace and quiet streets.  The city seemed cruel.  But now and then she learned that if cities are cruel, men are kind.

Thus, on the very day of the concert, the quarantine was broken for a few minutes.  It was broken forcibly, and by an officer of the law.  A little newsie, standing by a fire at the next corner, for the spring day was cold, had caught fire.  The big corner man had seen it all.  He stripped off his overcoat, rolled the boy in it, and ran to the hospital.  Here he was confronted by a brother officer, who was forbidden to admit him.  The corner man did the thing that seemed quickest.  He laid the newsie on the ground, knocked out the quarantine officer in two blows, broke the glass of the door with a third, slipped a bolt, and then, his burden in his arms, stalked in.

It did not lessen the majesty of that entrance that he was crying all the time.

The Probationer pondered that story when she heard it.  After all, laws were right and good, but there were higher things than laws.  She went and stood by Johnny’s bed for a long time, thinking.

In the meantime, unexpected talent for the concert had developed.  The piano in the chapel proving out of order, the elevator man proved to have been a piano tuner.  He tuned it with a bone forceps.  Strange places, hospitals, into which drift men from every walk of life, to find a haven and peace within their quiet walls.  Old Tony had sung, in his youth, in the opera at Milan.  A pretty young nurse went around the corridors muttering bits of “Orphant Annie” to herself.  The Senior Surgical Interne was to sing the “Rosary,” and went about practising to himself.  He came into H ward and sang it through for Jane Brown, with his heart in his clear young eyes.  He sang about the hours he had spent with her being strings of pearls, and all that, but he was really asking her if she would be willing to begin life with him in a little house, where she would have to answer the door-bell and watch telephone calls while he was out.

Jane Brown felt something of this, too.  For she said:  “You sing it beautifully,” although he had flatted at least three times.