THE INTERIOR CASTLE
525
vessel was unbeautiful: she thought, quailing, of those plastic folds
as palpable as the fingers of locked hands containing in their very
cells, their fissures, their repulsive hemispheres, the mind, the soul,
the inscrutable intelligence.
The porter, then, like the pink hat and like her mother and the
hounds' voices, loitered with her.
II
Dr. Nicholas came at nine o'clock to prepare her for the oper–
ation. With him came an entourage of white-frocked acolytes, and
one of them wheeled in a wagon on which lay knives and scissors
and pincers, cans of swabs and gauze. In the midst of these was a bowl
of liquid whose rich purple color made it seem strange like the brew of
an alchemist.
·
"All set?" he asked her, smiling. "A little nervous, what? I don't
blame you. I've often said I'd rather lose an arm than have a sub–
mucuous resection." Pansy thought for a moment he was going to
touch his nose. His approach to her was roundabout. He moved
through the yellow light shed by the glqbe in the ceiling which gave
his forehead a liquid gloss; he paused by the bureau and touched a
blossom of the cyclamen; he looked out the window and said, to no
one and to all, "I couldn't start my car this morning. Came in a
cab." Then he came forward.
As
he came, he removed a speculum
from the pocket of his short-sleeved coat and like a cat, inquiring of
the nature of a surface with its paws, he put out his hand toward her
and drew it back, gently murmuring, "You must not be afraid, my
dear. There is no danger, you know. Do you think for a minute I
would operate if there were?"
Dr. Nicholas, young, brilliant, and handsome, was an aristocrat,
a husband, a father, a clubman, a Christian, a kind counselor, and a
trustee of his school alumni association. Like many of the medical
profession, even those whose speciality was centered on the organ of
the basest sense, he interested himself in the psychology of his pa–
tients: in several instances, for example, he had found that severe
attacks of sinusitis were coincident with emotional crises. Miss Van–
neman more than ordinarily captured his fancy since her skull had
been fractured and her behavior throughout had been so extraordinary
that he felt he was observing at first hand some of the results of shock,
that incommensurable element, which frequently were too subtle to see.
There was, for example, the matter of her complete passivity during
