526
PARTISAN REVIEW
a lumbar puncture, reports of which were written down in her history
and were enlarged upon for
him
by Dr. Rivers' interne who had
been
in
charge. Except for a tremor in her throat and a deepening of
pallor, there were no signs at all that she was aware of what was hap–
pening to her. She made no sound, did not close her eyes nor clench
her fists. She had had several punctures; her only reaction had been
to the very first one, the morning after she had been brought in.
Wh~n
the interne explained to her that he was going to drain off
cerebrospinal fluid which was pressing against her brain, she ex–
claimed, "My God!" but it was not an exclamation of fear. The
young man had been unable to name what it was he had heard in
her voice; he could only say that it had not been fear as he had ob–
served it in other patients.
He wondered about her. There was no way of guessing whether
she had always had a nature of so tolerant and undemanding a com–
plexion. It gave him a melancholy pleasure to think that before her
accident she had been high-spirited and loquacious; he was moved to
think that perhaps she had been a beauty and that when she had
first een her face in the looking glass she had lost all joy in herself.
It was very difficult to tell what the face had been, for it was so
bruised and swollen, so hacked-up and lopsided. The black stitches
the length of the nose, across the saddle, across the cheekbone, showed
that there would be unsightly scars. He had ventured once to give
her the name of a plastic surgeon but she had only replied with a
vague, refusing smile. He had hoisted a manly shoulder and said,
"You're the doctor."
Much as he pondered, coming to no conclusions, about what
went on inside that pitiable skull, he was, of course, far more interested
in the nose, deranged so badly that it would require his topmost skill
to restore its functions to it. He would be obliged not only to make
a submucuous resection, a simple run-of-the-mill operation, but to
remove the vomer, always a delicate task but further complicated
in this case by the proximity of the bone to the frontal fracture line
which conceivably was not entirely closed.
If
it were not and he oper–
ated too soon and if a cold germ then found its way into the opening,
his patient would be carried off by meningitis
in
the twinkling of an
eye. He wondered if she knew in what potential danger she lay; he
desired to assure her that he had brought his craft to its nearest per–
fection and that she had nothing to fear of him, but feeling that she
was perhaps both ignorant and unimaginative and that such con–
solation would create a fear rather than dispel one, he held his tongue
