Without a single word of
greeting he allowed her to withdraw her hand. Wonder, and something he
could not understand, held him dumb.
For the next half hour he obeyed orders, moving as in a dream, assisting
the nurses in their work; and in a dream he went away to his own
quarters and thence out and over the dump and along the tote road that
led through the straggling shacks and across the river into the forest
beyond. But of neither river nor forest was he aware. Before his eyes
there floated an illusive vision of masses of fluffy golden hair above
a face of radiant purity, of deft fingers moving in swift and sure
precision as they wound the white rolls of bandages round bloody and
broken flesh, of two round capable arms whose lines suggested strength
and beauty, of a firm knit, pliant body that moved with easy sinuous
grace, of eyes--but ever at the eyes he paused, forgetting all else,
till, recalling himself, he began again, striving to catch and hold that
radiant, bewildering, illusive vision. That was a sufficiently maddening
process, but to relate that vision of radiant efficient strength
and grace to the one he carried of the farmer's daughter with her
dun-coloured straggling hair, her muddy complexion, her stupid face,
her clumsy, grimy hands and heavy feet, her sloppy figure, was quite
impossible.
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