Jane Harden and Sister Marigold helped the two surgeons to turn themselves into pieces of sterilized machinery. In a little while the anteroom was an austere arrangement in white, steel, and rubber-brown. There is something slightly repellent as well as something beautiful in absolute white. It is the negation of colour, the expression of coldness, the emblem of death. There is less sensuous pleasure in white than in any of the colours, and more suggestion of the macabre. A surgeon in his white robe, the warmth of his hands hidden by sleek chilly rubber, the animal vigour of his hair covered by a white cap, is more like a symbol in modern sculpture than a human being. To the layman he is translated, a priest in sacramental robes, a terrifying and subtly fascinating figure.

“Seen this new show at the Palladium?” asked Thoms. “Blast this glove! Give me another, matron.”

“No,” said Sir John Phillips.

“There’s a one-act play. Anteroom to a theatre in a private hospital. Famous surgeon has to operate on man who ruined him and seduced his wife. Problem—does he stick a knife into the patient? Grand Guignol stuff. Awful rot, I thought it.”

Phillips turned slowly and stared at him. Jane Harden uttered a little stifled cry.

“What’s that, nurse?” asked Thoms. “Have you seen it? Here, give me the glove.”

“No, sir,” murmured Jane, “I haven’t seen it.”

“Jolly well acted it was, and someone had put them right about technical matters, but, of course, the situation was altogether too far-fetched. I’ll just go and see—” He walked out, still talking, into the theatre, and after a minute or two called to the matron, who followed him.

“Jane,” said Phillips.

“Yes?”

“This—this is a queer business.”

“Nemesis, perhaps,” said Jane Harden.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said drearily. “Only it is rather like a Greek play, don’t you think? ‘Fate delivers our enemy into our hands.’ Mr. Thoms would think the situation very far-fetched.”

Phillips washed his hands slowly in a basin of sterilised water. “I knew nothing of this illness,” he said. “It’s the merest chance that I was here at this hour. I’d only just got in from St. Jude’s. I tried to get out of it, but his wife insisted. Evidently she has no idea we—quarrelled.”

“She could hardly know why you quarrelled, could she?”

“I’d give anything to be out of it—anything.”

“And I. How do you think I feel?”

He squeezed the water off his gloves and turned towards her, holding his hands out in front of him. He looked a grotesque and somehow pathetic figure.

“Jane,” he whispered, “won’t you change your mind? I love you so much.”

“No,” she said. “No. I loathe him. I never want to see him again, but as long as he’s alive I can’t marry you.”

“I don’t understand you,” he said heavily.