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 insistently 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 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 enlargement of the kidney in a child, and there were dislocated joints. Klaus Heinrich and Miss Spoelmann looked at everything, they looked together into the bottles which Doctor Sammet held up to the window, and their eyes looked thoughtful while the same look of repulsion hovered round their mouths.
They took turns too at the microscope, examined, with one eye placed to the lens, a malignant secretion, a piece of blue-stained tissue stuck on a slide, with tiny spots showing near the big patch. The spots were bacilli. Klaus Heinrich wanted Miss Spoelmann to take the first turn at the microscope, but she declined, knitting her brows and pouting, as much as to say: "On no account whatever." So he took the precedence, for it seemed to him that it really did not matter who got the first look at such serious and fearful things as bacilli. And after this they were conducted up to the second story, to the infants.