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‘You’re too good a man to do this to yourself.’

She was tired and didn’t want to clean up the glass on the bathroom floor, because as soon as he breathed evenly she wanted to get him over to the bed. But she decided finally to clean up the glass first; on her knees, searching a last piece of it, she thought:

–This isn’t what I ought to be doing. And this isn’t what heought to be doing.

Resentfully she stood up and regarded him. Through the thin delicate profile of his nose came a light snore, sighing, remote, inconsolable. The doctor had shaken his head in a certain way, and she knew that really it was a case that was beyond her. Besides, on her card at the agency was written, on the advice of her elders, ‘No Alcoholics’.

She had done her whole duty, but all she could think of was that when she was struggling about the room with him with that gin bottle there had been a pause when he asked her if she had hurt her elbow against a door and that she had answered: ‘You don’t know how people talk about you, no matter how you think of yourself–‘ when she knew he had a long time ceased to care about such things.

The glass was all collected–as she got out a broom to make sure, she realized that the glass, in its fragments, was less than a window through which they had seen each other for a moment. He did not know about her sister, and Bill Markoe whom she had almost married, and she did not know what had brought him to this pitch, when there was a picture on his bureau of his young wife and his two sons and him, all trim and handsome as he must have been five years ago. It was so utterly senseless–as she put a bandage on her finger where she had cut it while picking up the glass she made up her mind she would never take an alcoholic case again.

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It was early the next evening. Some Halloween jokester had split the side windows of the bus and she shifted back to the Negro section in the rear for fear the glass might fall out. She had her patient’s cheque but no way to cash it at this hour; there was a quarter and a penny in her purse.

Two nurses she knew were waiting in the hall of Mrs Hixson’s Agency.

‘What kind of case have you been on?’

‘Alcoholic,’ she said.

‘Oh, yes–Gretta Hawks told me about it–you were on with that cartoonist who lives at the Forest Park Inn.’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘I hear he’s pretty fresh.’

‘He’s never done anything to bother me,’ she lied.’You can’t treat them as if they were committed–‘

‘Oh, don’t get bothered–I just heard that around town–oh, you know–they want you to play around with them–‘

‘Oh, be quiet,’ she said, surprised at her own rising resentment.

In a moment Mrs Hixson came out and, asking the other two to wait, signalled her into the office.

‘I don’t like to put young girls on such cases,’ she began.’I got your call from the hotel.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t bad, Mrs Hixson. He didn’t know what he was doing and he didn’t hurt me in any way. I was thinking much more of my reputation with you. He was really nice all day yesterday. He drew me–‘

‘I didn’t want to send you on that case.’ Mrs Hixson thumbed through the registration cards.’You take T. B. cases, don’t you? Yes, I see you do. Now here’s one–‘

The phone rang in a continuous chime. The nurse listened as Mrs Hixson’s voice said precisely: