HEY had told her that only an operation could save her life, and that it must bee performed at once. The voice of the physician who first spoke seemed a trifle strained and unnatural as he delivered this decision. He hesitated imperceptibly over his words, and his eyes moved restlessly as she fastened hers upon them. Even in the sudden mental panic that had seized her, and which she was controlling so well, she realised his discomfort, and felt a vague gratitude for the sympathy that caused it.
It could not be easy, she reflected, to tell a young woman for whom life held as much as it did for her that a mortal disease had fastened on her. She, who had always analysed herself and others, discovered that even at this crisis she was dreamily trying to follow the mental process of the famous surgeon, who had begun to roam restlessly about the room.
"He will say nothing for a moment," she thought. "He is giving me time to pull myself together. I can, but I do need the time. He needs it too. He has had to tell a woman who is young and rich, one who is ambitious and in love, something that may mean the loss of all these things. He has made her feel as if the world were slipping under her feet. The only thing that may save her—the knife. My work must stop, my friends must stand by helplessly. Even Jack can do nothing for me —dear Jack, who would do anything. …"
The objects in the room grew suddenly dim. She sank deeper into the big chair that held her, while despair, sudden and unreasoning, filled her soul. The question which has so often come to men and women in agony, through all time, rose in her. Why, oh, why had existence begun at all, if it must end like this? To her the grim implacability of fate was as awful a revelation as if she were the only one to whom it had ever come. To be projected into the world through no volition of one's own; to be danced about like a puppet on a string; to have the body to which one is tied seized by disease, and to bee forced to watch one's own decay, helpless to arrest or avert it—that was a horror before which the soul itself must shrink.
Her strong soul was appalled by the prospect. Many had leaned on it in the course of her young life, whose brightness had not made her heedless of the gloom in which some have to walk. Her strength had never failed them; but in this tragedy it was failing herself, and she found no helper. She had made her appointment with the specialists, and had come to them without a word, even to those who were nearest to her. "Why should I go to them with my trouble?" she had asked herself. It may not he what I fear, and I should alarm them unnecessarily. If it is—well, there will be time enough to tell them when I know myself."
She thought of them now—at least, she thought of Jack. Was it only last June they had been married? It seemed as if they had always been together, as if they had always belonged to each other, as if life had only really begun when she met him. He came vividly before her—gay, debonair, his brown eyes full of the tenderness she knew so well. She pictured the change that would come in them when she told him—the thought wrung from her what her own suffering had not done. She groaned, and the three physicians at once assumed an air of professional interest.