Down the brick
pavement the relentless glare flashed back into the sky which hung hot blue
overhead. To Virginia, coming from the shade of her rooms, the city seemed
a furnace and the steady murmur a great discord in which every note was one
of pain.
Other women looking for their wounded hurried by her--one stopped to ask if
she had been into the unused tobacco warehouse and if she had seen there a
boy she knew by name? Another, with lint bandages in her hand, begged her
to come into a church hard by and assist in ravelling linen for the
surgeons. Then she looked down, saw the girl's figure, and grew nervous.
"You are not fit, my dear, go home," she urged, but Virginia shook her head
and smiled.
"I am looking for my husband," she answered in a cold voice and passed on.
Mammy Riah caught up with her, but she broke away. "Go home if you want
to--oh, go back," she cried irritably. "I am looking for Jack, you know."
Into the rude hospitals, one after one, she went without shuddering,
passing up and down between the ghastly rows lying half clothed upon the
bare plank floors. Her eyes were strained and eager, and more than one
dying man turned to look after her as she went by, and carried the memory
of her face with him to death. Once she stopped and folded a blanket under
the head of a boy who moaned aloud, and then gave him water from a pitcher
close at hand. "You're so cool--so cool," he sobbed, clutching at her
dress, but she smiled like one asleep and passed on rapidly.
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