THE INTERIOR CASTLE
523
that night at the Country Club. Mterward, Pansy went down to the
sea and threw the beautiful hat onto the full tide and saw it vanish
in the wake of a trawler. Thereafter, when she heard tH'e clam boy
coming down the road, she locked the door and when the knocking
had stopped and her mother called down from her chaise longue,
"Who was it, dearie?" she replied, "A salesman."
It was only the fact that the hat had been pink that worried
her. The rest of the memory was trivial, for she knew that she could
never again love anything as ecstatically as she loved the spirit of
Pansy Vanneman, enclosed within her head.
But her study was not without distraction, and she fought two
adversaries: pain and Dr. Nicholas. Against Dr. Nicholas, she de–
fended herself valorously and in fear; but pain, the pain, that is,
that was independent of his instruments, she sometimes forced upon
herself adventurously like a child scaring himself in a graveyard.
Dr. Nicholas greatly admired her crushed and splintered nose
which he daily probed and peered at, exclaiming that he had never
seen anything like it. His shapely hands ached for their knives; he
was impatient with the skull-fracture man's cautious delay. He spoke
of "our" nose and said "we" would be a new person when we could
breathe again. His own nose, the trademark of his profession, was
magnificent. Not even his own brilliant surgery could have improved
upon it nor could a first-rate sculptor have duplicated its direct
downward line which permitted only the least curvature inward to–
ward the end; nor the delicately rounded lateral declivities; nor the
thin-walled, perfectly matched nostrils. Miss Vanneman did not doubt
his humaneness nor his talent-he w.as a celebrated man-but she
questioned whether he had imagination. Immediately beyond the
prongs of his speculum lay her treasure whose price he, no more
than the nurses, could estimate. She believed he could not destroy it,
but she feared that he might maim it: might leave a scratch on one of
the brilliant facets of the jewel, bruise a petal of the flower, smudge
the glass where the light burned, blot the envelopes, and that then
she would die or would go mad. While she did not question that in
either eventuality her brain would after a time redeem its original
impeccability, she did not quite yet wish to enter upon either kind
of eternity, for she was not certain that she could carry with her her
knowledge as well as its receptacle.
Blunderer that he was, Dr. Nicholas was an honorable enemy,
not like the demon, pain, which skulked in a thousand guises within
her head, and which often she recklessly willed to attack her and
