“News!  This building is full of news.  I have some bits already.  Listen!” He took a notebook out of his pocket.  “The stork breaks quarantine.  New baby in O ward.  The chief engineer has developed a boil on his neck.  Elevator Man arrested for breaking speed limit.  Wanted, four square inches of cuticle for skin grafting in W. How’s that?  And I’m only beginning.”

Jane Brown listened.  Somehow, behind Twenty-two’s lightness of tone, she felt something more earnest.  She did not put it into words, even to herself, but she divined something new, a desire to do his bit, there in the hospital.  It was, if she had only known it, a milestone in a hitherto unmarked career.  Twenty-two, who had always been a man, was by way of becoming a person.

He explained about publishing it.  He used to run a typewriter in college, and the convalescents could mimeograph it and sell it.  There was a mimeographing machine in the office.

The Senior Surgical Interne came in just then.  Refusing to marry him had had much the effect of smacking a puppy.  He came back, a trifle timid, but friendly.  So he came in just then, and elected himself to the advertising and circulation department, and gave the Probationer the society end, although it was not his paper or his idea, and sat down at once at the table and started a limerick, commencing: 

          “We’re here in the city, marooned”

However, he never got any further with it, because there are, apparently, no rhymes for “marooned.”  He refused “tuned” which several people offered him, with extreme scorn.

Up to this point Jane Brown had been rather too worried to think about Twenty-two.  She had grown accustomed to seeing him coming slowly back toward her ward, his eyes travelling much faster than he did.  Not, of course, that she knew that.  And to his being, in a way, underfoot a part of every day, after the Head had made rounds and was safely out of the road for a good two hours.

But two things happened that day to turn her mind in onto her heart.  One was when she heard about the artificial leg.  The other was when she passed the door of his room, where a large card now announced “Office of the Quarantine Sentinel.”  She passed the door, and she distinctly heard most un-hospital-like chatter within.  Judging from the shadows on the glass door, too, the room was full.  It sounded joyous and carefree.

Something in Jane Brown—­her mind, probably—­turned right around and looked into her heart, and made an odd discovery.  This was that Jane Brown’s heart had sunk about two inches, and was feeling very queer.

She went straight on, however, and put on a fresh collar in her little bedroom, and listed her washing and changed her shoes, because her feet still ached a lot of the time.  But she was a brave person and liked to look things in the face.  So before she went back to the ward, she stood in front of her mirror and said: