THE INTERIOR CASTLE
521
turn the pillows or to unmoor the counterpane; but hour after hour
and day after day she lay at full length and would not even suffer
the nurses to raise the head-piece of the adjustable bed. So perfect
and stubborn was her body's immobility that it was as if the room and
the landscape, mortified by the ice, were extensions of herself. Her
resolute quiescence .and her disinclination to talk, the one seeming
somehow to proceed from the other, resembled, so the nurses said, a
final coma. And they observed, in pitying indignation, that she might
as
well
be dead for all the interest she took in life. Amongst them–
selves they scolded her for what they thought a moral weakness: an
automobile accident, no matter how serious, was not reason enough
for anyone to give up the will to live or to be happy. She had not–
to come down bluntly to the facts-had the decency to be grateful
that it was the driver of the cab and not she who had died. (And how
dreadfully the man had died!) She was twenty-five years old and she
came from a distant city. These were really the only facts known
about her. Evidently she had not been here long, for she had no
visitors, a lack which was at first sadly moving to the nurses but which
became to them a source of unreasonable annoyance: had . anyone
the right to live so one-dimensionally? It was impossible to laugh at
her, for she said nothing absurd; her demands could not be com–
plained of because they did not exist; she could not be hated for a
sharp tongue nor for a supercilious one; she could not be admired for
bravery or for wit or for interest in her fellow creatures. She was
believed to be a frightful snob.
Pansy, for her part, took a secret and mischievous pleasure in the
bewilderment of her attendants and the more they courted her with
offers of magazines, cross-word puzzles, and a radio which she could
rent from the hospital, the farther she retired from them into herself
and into the world which she had created in her long hours here and
which no one could ever penetrate nor imagine. Sometimes she did
not even answer the nurses' questions; as they rubbed her back with
alcohol and steadily discoursed, she was as remote from them as if
she were miles .away. She did not think that she lived on a higher
plane than that of the nurses and the doctors but that she lived on a
different one and that at this particular time-this time of exploration
and habituation-she had no extra strength to spend on making her–
self known to them. All she had been before and all the memories she
might have brought out to disturb the monotony of, say, the morning
bath, and
all
that the past meant to the future when she would
leave the hospital, were of no present consequence to her. Not even
