To one who wants to serve God and his fellow-creatures--which I take it is the highest form of religion--here is an opportunity that he may bless God for giving him.
Here he can earn a brighter crown than is given them who die at the stake for opinion's sake." So earnest was his enthusiasm that Rachel felt herself lifted up by it, in spite of her discomforts.

But then she turned her eyes away from his impassioned face, and looked over the array of white beds, each with its pale and haggard occupant, his eyes blazing with the delirium of fever, or closed in the langor of exhaustion, with limbs tossing as the febrile fire seethed the blood, or quivering with the last agonies.

Groans, prayers, and not a few oaths fell on her ears.

The repulsive smell of the disinfectants, the nauseating odor of the sick room where hundreds of invalids were lying, the horrible effluvia of the typhus rose on the hot air, and seemed part of the misery which so strongly assailed her other senses.
She was sick at heart, and with every feeling in active revolt, but without a word she turned and followed Dr.Denslow to a hot, close, little room which had been cut off one end of the hospital, though not so separated from it but that the sounds and odors from the sick wards continually filtered in through the wide cracks in its plank sides.
An iron bedstead, of the same pattern as that upon which the sick lay, stood in one corner, and in another was a rudely-fashioned stand, upon which was a tin-basin, a cake of yellow bar-soap, and a bucket of water for washing.

This was all the furniture.
As the door closed behind the Doctor, Rachel threw herself upon the cot, in a fit of despair at the wreck of all her fancies, and the repulsiveness of the career upon which she had embarked.
"I can not--I will not--live here a week," she said to herself, over and over again.