probable that he fell into the water. There are many indications to the contrary. He had run away from home. Yes." He stopped.
And Klaus Heinrich again felt Miss Spoelmann looking at him with her big, black, serious eyes—with her glance which sought his own and seemed to challenge him in sistently to ponder with her the "sad cases," to grasp the essential meaning of Doctor Sammet's remarks, to penetrate to the hideous truths which were incorporated and crystallized in these two little invalid frames.… A little girl wept bitterly when the steaming and hissing inhaler, together with a scrapbook full of brightly coloured pictures, was planted at her bedside.
Miss Spoelmann bent over the little one. "It doesn't hurt," she said, "not a tiny bit. Don't cry." And as she straightened herself again she added quickly, pursing up her lips, "I guess it's not so much the apparatus as the pictures she's crying at." Everybody laughed. One of the young assistants picked up the scrapbook and laughed still louder when he looked at the pictures. The party passed on into the laboratory. Klaus Heinrich thought, as he went, how dry Miss Spoelmann's humour was. "I guess," she had said, and "not so much." She had seemed to find amusement not only in the pictures, but also in the neat and incisive mode of expression she had used. And that was indeed the very refinement of humour.…
The laboratory was the biggest room in the building. Glasses, retorts, funnels, and chemicals stood on the tables, as well as specimens in spirits which Doctor Sammet explained to his guests in a few quiet words. A child had choked in a mysterious way: here was his larynx with mushroom-like growths instead of the vocal chords. Yes. This, here in the glass, was a case of pernicious en largement of the kidney in a child, and there were dislocated joints. Klaus Heinrich and Miss Spoelmann
