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He was the first visitor to arrive on Ward VII the next afternoon. The odor of phenol and iodoform that had pervaded the clinic hovered here also. The beds were repellently white and orderly. There were only a few scattered patients -- ugly women in bath robes and mules.
He found Linda seated beside a bed; a profusion of cotton and gauze was piled at one end of the bed, and from these Linda, with great concentration and delicate, mysterious precision was fashioning oblong pads which she stacked at the opposite end. Her back was toward him, and he stood for a moment behind her, looking; and if yesterday he had had strange emotions watching the unaware Merrit, today his feelings were past understanding watching the unaware Linda. Nothing seemed to be wrong with her, yet the sight of her sitting there in that clean, sparse, terrible place, bending so intently over her task, made his breath stop in his throat, so that he had to swallow it deliberately before he could speak.