Chapter I: Front Matter (1)

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Transcriber’s Notes

This e-text is based on ‘The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine,’
from August, 1913. The table of contents, based on the index from
the May issue, has been added by the transcriber.

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation have been retained, but
punctuation and typographical errors have been corrected. Passages
in English dialect and in languages other than English have not
been altered. In some cases, such as in ‘Fresh Light on Washington’
(p. 635), errors seem to be introduced deliberately; here, the text
has been retained as printed in the original.

Special characters have been used to highlight the following font
styles:

italic: _underscores_
small caps: ~tilde characters~

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HERMAN
PFEIFER

Plates in tint, engraved for ~The Century~ by H. C. Merrill and H. Davidson

“AND ‘INASMUCH,’ HE SAID. JUST THAT--‘INASMUCH.’ SO THAT’S HOW I HAPPENED TO GO INTO NURSING”

DRAWN BY HERMAN PFEIFER]

MIDSUMMER HOLIDAY NUMBER

~The Century Magazine~

Vol. LXXXVI AUGUST, 1913 No. 4

Copyright, 1913, by ~The Century Co.~ All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

PAGE

~White Linen Nurse, The~ _Eleanor Hallowell Abbott_ 483
Pictures, printed in tint, by
Herman Pfeifer.

~Romain Rolland.~ _Alvan F. Sanborn_ 512
Picture from portrait of Rolland
from a drawing by Granié.

~Balkan Peninsula, Skirting the~ _Robert Hichens_
VI. Stamboul, the City of Mosques. 519
Pictures by Jules Guérin, two
printed in color.

~Trade of the World Papers, The~ _James Davenport Whelpley_
XVII. If Canada were to Annex the
United States 534
Pictures from photographs.

~Impractical Man, The~ _Elliott Flower_ 549
Pictures by F. R. Gruger.

~British Uncommunicativeness.~ _A. C. Benson_ 567

~Gutter-Nickel, The~ _Estelle Loomis_ 570
Picture by J. Montgomery Flagg.

~Voyage Over, The First~ _Theodore Dreiser_ 586
Pictures by W. J. Glackens.

~Japan, the New, American Makers of~ _William Elliot Griffis_ 597
Pictures from photographs.

~Golf, Mind Versus Muscle in~ _Marshall Whitlatch_ 606

~T. Tembarom.~ _Frances Hodgson Burnett_ 610
Drawings by Charles S. Chapman.

~Going Up.~ _Frederick Lewis Allen_ 632
Picture by Reginald Birch.

~Washington, Fresh Light on~ 635

~Cartoons.~
A Boy’s Best Friend. _May Wilson Preston_ 634
“The Fifth Avenue Girl” and “A Bit
of Gossip.” Sculpture by _Ethel Myers_ 635
The Child de Luxe. _Boardman Robinson_ 636

VERSE

~Double Star, A~ _Leroy Titus Weeks_ 511

~Message from Italy, A~ _Margaret Widdemer_ 547
Drawing printed in tint by
W. T. Benda.

~Marvelous Munchausen, The~ _William Rose Benét_ 563
Pictures by Oliver Herford.

~Wingèd Victory.~ _Victor Whitlock_ 596
Photograph and decoration.

~Royal Mummy, To a~ _Anna Glen Stoddard_ 631

~Triolet, A~ _Leroy Titus Weeks_ 636

~Rymbels.~
Pictures by Oliver Herford.
The Girl and the Raspberry Ice. _Oliver Herford_ 637
The Yellow Vase. _Charles Hanson Towne_ 637
Tragedy. _Theodosia Garrison_ 638
“On Revient toujours à Son Premier
Amour”. _Oliver Herford_ 638

~Limericks.~
Text and pictures by Oliver Herford.

XXXII. The Eternal Feminine. 639
XXXIII. Tra-la-Larceny. 640

THE WHITE LINEN NURSE

HOW RAE MALGREGOR UNDERTOOK GENERAL HEARTWORK FOR A FAMILY OF TWO

BY ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT

Author of “Molly Make-Believe,” etc.

IN THREE PARTS: PART ONE

The White Linen Nurse was so tired that her noble expression ached.

Incidentally her head ached and her shoulders ached and her lungs ached, and the ankle-bones of both feet ached excruciatingly; but nothing of her felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression. Like a strip of lip-colored lead suspended from her poor little nose by two tugging, wire-gray wrinkles, her persistently conscientious sick-room smile seemed to be whanging aimlessly against her front teeth. The sensation was very unpleasant.

Looking back thus on the three spine-curving, chest-cramping, foot-twinging, ether-scented years of her hospital training, it dawned on the White Linen Nurse very suddenly that nothing of her ever _had_ felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression.

Impulsively she sprang for the prim white mirror that capped her prim white bureau, and stood staring up into her own entrancing, bright-colored Nova Scotian reflection with tense, unwonted interest.

Except for the unmistakable smirk which fatigue had clawed into her plastic young mouth-lines, there was nothing special the matter with what she saw.

“Perfectly good face,” she attested judicially, with no more than common courtesy to her progenitors--“perfectly good and tidy-looking face, if only--if only--” her breath caught a trifle--“if only it didn’t look so disgustingly noble and--hygienic--and _dollish_.”

All along the back of her neck little sharp, prickly pains began to sting and burn.

“Silly--simpering--pink-and-white puppet!” she scolded squintingly, “I’ll teach you how to look like a real girl!”

Very threateningly she raised herself to her tiptoes and thrust her glowing, corporeal face right up into the moulten, elusive, quicksilver face in the mirror. Pink for pink, blue for blue, gold for gold, dollish smirk for dollish smirk, the mirror mocked her seething inner fretfulness.

“Why, darn you!” she gasped--“why, darn you--why, you looked more human than _that_ when you left the Annapolis Valley three years ago! There were at least tears in your face then, and cinders, and your mother’s best advice, and the worry about the mortgage, and the blush of Joe Hazeltine’s kiss.”

Furtively with the tip of her index-finger she started to search her imperturbable pink cheek for the spot where Joe Hazeltine’s kiss had formerly flamed.

“My hands are all right, anyway,” she acknowledged with vast relief. Triumphantly she raised both strong, stub-fingered, exaggeratively executive hands to the level of her childish blue eyes, and stood surveying the mirrored effect with ineffable satisfaction. “Why, my hands are--dandy!” she gloated. “Why, they’re perfectly dandy! Why, they’re wonderful! Why, they’re--” Then suddenly and fearfully she gave a shrill little scream. “But they don’t go with my silly doll-face,” she cried. “Why, they don’t! They don’t! My God! they _don’t_! They go with the Senior Surgeon’s scowling Heidelberg eyes. They go with the Senior Surgeon’s grim, gray jaw. They go with the--Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?”

Dizzily, with her stubby finger-tips prodded deep into every jaded facial muscle that she could compass, she staggered toward the air and, dropping down into the first friendly chair that bumped against her knees, sat staring blankly out across the monotonous city roofs that flanked her open window, trying very, very hard, for the first time in her life, to consider the general phenomenon of being a trained nurse.

All about her, as inexorable as anæsthesia, horrid as the hush of tomb or public library, lurked the painfully unmistakable sense of institutional restraint. Mournfully to her ear from some remote kitcheny region of pots and pans a browsing spoon tinkled forth from time to time with soft muffled resonance. Up and down every clammy white corridor innumerable young feet, born to prance and stamp, were creeping stealthily to and fro in rubber-heeled whispers. Along the somber fire-escape just below her windowsill, like a covey of snubbed doves, six or eight of her classmates were cooing and crooning together with excessive caution concerning the imminent graduation exercises that were to take place at eight o’clock that very evening. Beyond her dreariest ken of muffled voices, beyond her dingiest vista of slate and brick, on a far, faint hillside, a far, faint streak of April green went roaming jocundly skyward. Altogether sluggishly, as though her nostrils were plugged with warm velvet, the smell of spring and ether and scorched mutton-chops filtered in and out, in and out, in and out, of her abnormally jaded senses.

Taken all in all, it was not a propitious afternoon for any girl as tired and as pretty as the White Linen Nurse to be considering the general phenomenon of anything except April.

In the real country, they tell me, where the young spring runs as wild and bare as a nymph through every dull-brown wood and hay-gray meadow, the blasé farmer-lad will not even lift his eyes from the plow to watch the pinkness of her passing. But here in the prudish brick-minded city, where the young spring at her friskiest is nothing more audacious than a sweltering, winter-swathed madcap who has impishly essayed some fine morning to tiptoe down street in her soft, sloozily, green-silk-stockinged feet, the whole hobnailed population reels back aghast and agrin before the most innocent flash of the rogue’s green-veiled toes. And then, suddenly snatching off its own cumbersome winter foot-habits, goes chasing madly after her in its own prankish, varicolored socks.

Now, the White Linen Nurse’s socks were black, and cotton at that, a combination incontestably sedate. And the White Linen Nurse had waded barefoot through too many posied country pastures to experience any ordinary city thrill over the sight of a single blade of grass pushing scarily through a crack in the pavement, or a puny, concrete-strangled maple-tree flushing wanly to the smoky sky. Indeed, for three hustling, square-toed, rubber-heeled city years the White Linen Nurse had never even stopped to notice whether the season was flavored with frost or thunder. But now, unexplainably, just at the end of it all, sitting innocently there at her own prim little bedroom window, staring innocently out across indomitable roof-tops, with the crackle of glory and diplomas already ringing in her ears, she heard instead, for the first time in her life, the gaily daredevil voice of the spring, a hoidenish challenge flung back at her, leaf-green, from the crest of a winter-scarred hill.

“Hello, White Linen Nurse!” screamed the saucy city Spring. “Hello, White Linen Nurse! Take off your homely starched collar, or your silly candy-box cap, or any other thing that feels maddeningly artificial, and come out! And be _very wild_!”

Like a puppy-dog cocking its head toward some strange, unfamiliar sound, the White Linen Nurse cocked her head toward the lure of the green-crested hill. Still wrestling conscientiously with the general phenomenon of being a trained nurse, she found her collar suddenly very tight, her tiny cap inexpressibly heavy and vexatious. Timidly she removed the collar, and found that the removal did not rest her in the slightest. Equally timidly she removed the cap, and found that even that removal did not rest her in the slightest. Then very, very slowly, but very, very permeatingly and completely, it dawned on the White Linen Nurse that never while eyes were blue, and hair was gold, and lips were red, would she ever find rest again until she had removed her noble expression.

With a jerk that started the pulses in her temples throbbing like two toothaches, she straightened up in her chair. All along the back of her neck the little blond curls began to crisp very ticklingly at their roots.

Still staring worriedly out over the old city’s slate-gray head to that inciting prance of green across the farthest horizon, she felt her whole being kindle to an indescribable passion of revolt against all hushed places. Seething with fatigue, smoldering with ennui, she experienced suddenly a wild, almost incontrollable, impulse to sing, to shout, to scream from the house-tops, to mock somebody, to defy everybody, to break laws, dishes, heads--anything, in fact, that would break with a _crash_.

And then at last, over the hills and far away, with all the outraged world at her heels, to run, and run, and run, and run, and _run_, and _laugh_, till her feet raveled out, and her lungs burst, and there was nothing more left of her at all--ever, ever, any more!

Discordantly into this rapturously pagan vision of pranks and posies broke one of her room-mates all a-whiff with ether, a-whir with starch.

Instantly with the first creak of the door-handle, the White Linen Nurse was on her feet, breathless, resentful, grotesquely defiant.

“Get out of here, Zillah Forsyth!” she cried furiously. “Get out of here quick, and leave me alone! I want to think.”

Perfectly serenely the new-comer advanced into the room. With her pale, ivory-tinted cheeks, her great limpid, brown eyes, her soft dark hair parted madonna-like across her beautiful brow, her whole face was like some exquisite composite picture of all the saints of history. Her voice also was amazingly tranquil.

“Oh, fudge!” she drawled. “What’s eating you, Rae Malgregor? I won’t either get out. It’s my room just as much as it is yours. And Helene’s just as much as it is ours. And, besides,” she added more briskly, “it’s four o’clock now, and, with graduation at eight and the dance afterward, if we don’t get our stuff packed up now, when in thunder shall we get it done?” Quite irrelevantly she began to laugh. Her laugh was perceptibly shriller than her speaking-voice. “Say, Rae,” she confided, “that minister I nursed through pneumonia last winter wants me to pose as ‘Sanctity’ for a stained-glass window in his new church! Isn’t he the softy?”

“Shall you do it?” quizzed Rae Malgregor, a trifle tensely.

“Shall I do it?” mocked the new-comer. “Well, you just watch me! Four mornings a week in June at full week’s wages? Fresh Easter lilies every day? White silk angel-robes? All the high souls and high paints kowtowing around me? Why, it would be more fun than a box of monkeys. Sure I’ll do it.”

Expeditiously as she spoke, the new-comer reached up for the framed motto over her own ample mirror, and yanking it down with one single tug, began to busy herself adroitly with a snarl in the picture-cord. Like a withe of willow yearning over a brook, her slender figure curved to the task. Very scintillatingly the afternoon light seemed to brighten suddenly across her lap. “You’ll Be A Long Time Dead!” glinted the motto through its sun-dazzled glass.

Still panting with excitement, still bristling with resentment, Rae Malgregor stood surveying the intrusion and the intruder. A dozen impertinent speeches were rioting in her mind. Twice her mouth opened and shut before she finally achieved the particular opprobrium that completely satisfied her.

“Bah! you look like a--trained nurse!” she blurted forth at last with hysterical triumph.

“So do you,” said the new-corner, amiably.

With a little gasp of dismay, Rae Malgregor sprang suddenly forward. Her eyes were flooded with tears.

“Why, that’s just exactly what’s the matter with me!” she cried. “My face is all worn out trying to look like a trained nurse! O Zillah, how do you know you were meant to be a trained nurse? How does anybody know? O Zillah! save me! Save me!”

Languorously Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work and laughed. Her laugh was like the accidental tinkle of sleigh-bells in midsummer, vaguely disquieting, a shiver of frost across the face of a lily.

“Save you from what, you great big overgrown, tow-headed doll-baby?” she questioned blandly. “For Heaven’s sake, the only thing you need is to go back to whatever toy-shop you came from and get a new head. What in creation’s the matter with you lately, anyway Oh, of course you’ve had rotten luck this past month but what of it? That’s the trouble with you country girls. You haven’t got any stamina.”

With slow, shuffling-footed astonishment Rae Malgregor stepped out into the center of the room. “Country girls!” she repeated blankly. “Why, you’re a country girl yourself.”

“I _am_ not,” snapped Zillah Forsyth. “I’ll have you understand that there are nine thousand people in the town I come from, and not a rube among them. Why, I tended soda-fountain in the swellest drug store there a whole year before I even thought of taking up nursing. And I wasn’t as green when I was six months old as you are now.”

Slowly, with a soft-snuggling sigh of contentment, she raised her slim white fingers to coax her dusky hair a little looser, a little farther down, a little more madonna-like across her sweet, mild forehead, then, snatching out abruptly at a convenient shirt-waist, began with extraordinary skill to apply its dangly lace sleeves as a protective bandage for the delicate glass-faced motto still in her lap, placed the completed parcel with inordinate scientific precision in the exact corner of her packing-box, and then went on very diligently, very zealously, to strip the men’s photographs from the mirror on her bureau. There were twenty-seven photographs in all, and for each one she had there already cut and prepared a small square of perfectly fresh, perfectly immaculate, white tissue wrapping-paper. No one so transcendently fastidious, so exquisitely neat in all her personal habits, had ever before been trained in that particular hospital.

Very soberly the doll-faced girl stood watching the men’s pleasant paper countenances smoothed away one by one into their chaste white veilings, until at last, quite without warning, she poked an accusing, inquisitive finger directly across Zillah Forsyth’s shoulder.

“Zillah,” she demanded peremptorily, “all the year I’ve wanted to know, all the year every other girl in our class has wanted to know--_where_ did you ever get that picture of the Senior Surgeon? He never gave it to you in the world. He didn’t, he didn’t! He’s not that kind.”

Deeply into Zillah Forsyth’s pale, ascetic cheek dawned a most amazing dimple.

“Sort of jarred you girls some, didn’t it,” she queried, “to see me strutting round with a photo of the Senior Surgeon?” The little cleft in her chin showed suddenly with almost startling distinctness. “Well, seeing it’s you,” she grinned, “and the year’s all over, and there’s nobody left that I can worry about it any more, I don’t mind telling you in the least that I--bought it out of a photographer’s show-case. There, are you satisfied now?”

With easy nonchalance she picked up the picture in question and scrutinized it shrewdly.

“Lord! what a face!” she attested. “Nothing but granite. Hack him with a knife, and he wouldn’t bleed, but just chip off into pebbles.” With exaggerated contempt she shrugged her supple shoulders. “Bah! how I hate a man like that! There’s no fun in him.” A little abruptly she turned and thrust the photograph into Rae Malgregor’s hand. “You can have it if you want to,” she said. “I’ll trade it to you for that lace corset-cover of yours.”

Like water dripping through a sieve the photograph slid through Rae Malgregor’s frightened fingers. With nervous apology she stooped and picked it up again, and held it gingerly by one remote corner. Her eyes were quite wide with horror.

“Oh, of course I’d like the--picture well enough,” she stammered, “but it wouldn’t seem--exactly respectable to--to trade it for a corset-cover.”

“Oh, very well,” drawled Zillah Forsyth; “tear it up, then.”

Expeditiously, with frank, non-sentimental fingers, Rae Malgregor tore the tough cardboard across, and again across, and once again across, and threw the conglomerate fragments into the waste-basket. And her expression all the time was no more, no less, than the expression of a person who would vastly rather execute his own pet dog or cat than risk the possible bungling of an outsider. Then, like a small child trotting with great relief to its own doll-house, she trotted over to her bureau, extracted the lace corset-cover, and came back with it in her hand, to lean across Zillah Forsyth’s shoulder again and watch the men’s faces go slipping off into oblivion. Once again, abruptly, without warning, she halted the process with a breathless exclamation.

“Oh, of course this waist is the only one I’ve got with ribbons in it,” she asserted irrelevantly, “but I’m perfectly willing to trade it for _that_ picture.” She pointed out with unmistakably explicit finger-tip.

Chucklingly, Zillah Forsyth withdrew the special photograph from its half-completed wrappings.

“Oh, him?” she said. “Oh, that’s a chap I met on the train last summer. He’s a brakeman or something. He’s a--”

Perfectly unreluctantly Rae Malgregor dropped the fluff of lace and ribbons into Zillah’s lap and reached out with cheerful voraciousness to annex the young man’s picture to her somewhat bleak possessions. “Oh, I don’t care a rap who he is,” she interrupted briskly; “but he’s sort of cute-looking, and I’ve got an empty frame at home just that odd size, and mother’s crazy for a new picture to stick up over the kitchen mantelpiece. She gets so tired of seeing nothing but the faces of people she knows all about.”

Sharply Zillah Forsyth turned and stared up into the younger girl’s face, and found no guile to whet her stare against.

“Well, of all the ridiculous, unmitigated _greenhorns_!” she began. “Well, is _that_ all you wanted him for? Why, I supposed you wanted to write to him. Why, I supposed--”

For the first time an expression not altogether dollish darkened across Rae Malgregor’s garishly juvenile blondness.

“Maybe I’m not quite as green as you think I am,” she flared up stormily. With this sharp flaring-up every single individual pulse in her body seemed to jerk itself suddenly into conscious activity again, like the soft, plushy _pound-pound-pound_ of a whole stocking-footed regiment of pain descending single file upon her for her hysterical undoing. “Maybe I’ve had a good deal more experience than you give me credit for,” she hastened excitedly to explain. “I tell you--I tell you, _I’ve been engaged_!” she blurted forth with a bitter sort of triumph.

With a palpable flicker of interest Zillah Forsyth looked back across her shoulder.

“Engaged? How many times?” she asked bluntly.

As though the whole monogamous groundwork of civilization was threatened by the question, Rae Malgregor’s hands went clutching at her breast.

“Why, _once_!” she gasped. “Why, _once_!”

Convulsively Zillah Forsyth began to rock herself to and fro.

“Oh, Lordy!” she chuckled. “Oh, Lordy! Lordy! Why, I’ve been engaged four times just this past year.” In a sudden passion of fastidiousness, she bent down over the particular photograph in her hand and, snatching at a handkerchief, began to rub diligently at a small smutch of dust in one corner of the cardboard. Something in the effort of rubbing seemed to jerk her small round chin into almost angular prominence. “And before I’m through,” she added, at least two notes below her usual alto tones--“and before I’m through, I’m going to get engaged to every profession that there is on the surface of the globe.” Quite helplessly the thin paper skin of the photograph peeled off in company with the smutch of dust. “And when I marry,” she ejaculated fiercely--“and when I marry, I’m going to marry a man who will take me to every place that there is on the surface of the globe. And after that--”

“After _what_?” interrogated a brand-new voice from the doorway.

It was the other room-mate this time. The only real aristocrat in the whole graduating class, high-browed, high-cheek-boned, eyes like some far-sighted young prophet, mouth even yet faintly arrogant with the ineradicable consciousness of caste, a plain, eager, stripped-for-a-long-journey type of face--this was Helene Churchill. There was certainly no innocuous bloom of country hills and pastures in this girl’s face, nor any seething small-town passion pounding indiscriminately at all the doors of experience. The men and women who had bred Helene Churchill had been the breeders also of brick and granite cities since the world was new.

Like one vastly more accustomed to treading on Persian carpets than on painted floors, she came forward into the room.

“Hello, children!” she said casually, and began at once without further parleying to take down the motto that graced her own bureau-top.

It was the era when almost everybody in the world had a motto over his bureau. Helene Churchill’s motto was “Inasmuch As Ye Have Done It Unto One Of The Least Of These, Ye Have Done It Unto Me.” On a scroll of almost priceless parchment the text was illuminated with inimitable Florentine skill and color. A little carelessly, after the manner of people quite accustomed to priceless things, she proceeded now to roll the parchment into its smallest possible circumference, humming exclusively to herself all the while an intricate little air from an Italian opera.

So the three faces foiled each other, sober city girl, pert town girl, bucolic country girl, a hundred fundamental differences rampant between them, yet each fervid, adolescent young mouth tamed to the same monotonous, drolly exaggerated expression of _complacency_ that characterizes the faces of all people who, in a distinctive uniform, for a reasonably satisfactory living wage, make an actual profession of righteous deeds.

Indeed among all the thirty or more varieties of noble expression which an indomitable Superintendent had finally succeeded in inculcating into her graduating class, no other physiognomies had responded more plastically perhaps than these three to the merciless imprint of the great hospital machine which, in pursuance of its one repetitive design, discipline, had coaxed Zillah Forsyth into the semblance of a lady, snubbed Helene Churchill into the substance of plain womanhood, and, still uncertain just what to do with Rae Malgregor’s rollicking rural immaturity, had frozen her face temporarily into the smugly dimpled likeness of a fancy French doll rigged out as a nurse for some gilt-edged hospital fair.

With characteristic desire to keep up in every way with her more mature, better educated classmates, to do everything, in fact, so fast, so well, that no one would possibly guess that she hadn’t yet figured out just why she was doing it at all, Rae Malgregor now, with quickly reconventionalized cap and collar, began to hurl herself into the task of her own packing. From her open bureau drawer, with a sudden impish impulse toward worldly wisdom, she extracted first of all the photograph of the young brakeman.

“See, Helene! My new beau!” she giggled experimentally.

In mild-eyed surprise Helene Churchill glanced up from her work. “_Your_ beau?” she corrected. “Why, that’s Zillah’s picture.”

“Well, it’s mine now,” snapped Rae Malgregor, with unexpected edginess. “It’s mine now, all right. Zillah said I could have him. Zillah said I could--write to him--if I wanted to,” she finished a bit breathlessly.

Wider and wider Helene Churchill’s eyes dilated.

“Write to a man whom you don’t know?” she gasped. “Why, Rae! Why, it isn’t even very nice to have a picture of a man you don’t know.”

Mockingly to the edge of her strong white teeth Rae Malgregor’s tongue crept out in pink derision.

“Bah!” she taunted. “What’s _nice_? That’s the whole matter with you, Helene Churchill. You never stop to consider whether anything’s fun or not; all you care is whether it’s _nice_.” Excitedly she turned to meet the cheap little wink from Zillah’s sainted eyes. “Bah! What’s _nice_?” she persisted, a little lamely. Then suddenly all the pertness within her crumbled into nothingness. “That’s--the--whole trouble with _you_, Zillah Forsyth,” she stammered--“you never give a hang whether anything’s nice or not; all you care is whether it’s fun.” Quite helplessly she began to wring her hands. “Oh, how do I know which one of you girls to follow?” she demanded wildly. “How do I know anything? How does anybody know anything?”

Like a smoldering fuse the rambling query crept back into the inner recesses of her brain, and fired once more the one great question that lay dormant there. Impetuously she ran forward and stared into Helene Churchill’s face.

“How do you know you were meant to be a trained nurse, Helene Churchill?” she began all over again. “How does anybody know she was really meant to be one? How can anybody, I mean, be perfectly sure?” Like a drowning man clutching out at the proverbial straw, she clutched at the parchment in Helene Churchill’s hand. “I mean--where did you get your motto, Helene Churchill?” she persisted, with increasing irritability. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll tear the whole thing to pieces.”

With a startled frown, Helene Churchill jerked back out of reach.

“What’s the matter with you, Rae?” she quizzed sharply, and then, turning round casually to her book-case, began to draw from the shelves one by one her beloved Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth, Robert Browning. “Oh, I did so want to go to China,” she confided irrelevantly; “but my family have just written me that they won’t stand for it. So I suppose I’ll have to go into tenement work here in the city instead.” With a visible effort she jerked her mind back again to the feverish question in Rae Malgregor’s eyes. “Oh, you want to know where I got my motto?” she asked. A flash of intuition brightened suddenly across her absent-mindedness. “Oh,” she smiled, “you mean you want to know just what the incident was that first made me decide to devote my life to humanity?”

“Yes,” snapped Rae Malgregor.

A little shyly Helene Churchill picked up her copy of Marcus Aurelius and cuddled her cheek against its tender morocco cover.

“Really?” she questioned with palpable hesitation--“really, you want to know? Why, why--it’s rather a--sacred little story to me. I shouldn’t exactly want to have anybody--laugh about it.”

“I’ll laugh if I want to,” attested Zillah Forsyth, forcibly, from the other side of the room.

Like a pugnacious boy’s, Rae Malgregor’s fluent fingers doubled up into two firm fists.

“I’ll punch her if she even looks as though she wanted to,” she signaled surreptitiously to Helene.

Shrewdly for an instant the city girl’s narrowing eyes challenged and appraised the country girl’s desperate sincerity. Then quite abruptly she began her little story.

“Why, it was on an Easter Sunday, oh, ages and ages ago,” she faltered. “Why, I couldn’t have been more than nine years old at the time.” A trifle self-consciously she turned her face away from Zillah Forsyth’s supercilious smile. “And I was coming home from a Sunday-school festival in my best white muslin dress, with a big pot of purple pansies in my hand,” she hastened somewhat nervously to explain. “And just at the edge of the gutter there was a dreadful drunken man lying in the mud, with a great crowd of cruel people teasing and tormenting him. And because--because I couldn’t think of anything else to do about it, I--I walked right up to the poor old creature, scared as I could be, and--and I presented him with my pot of purple pansies. And everybody of course began to laugh--to scream, I mean--and shout with amusement. And I, of course, began to cry. And the old drunken man straightened up very oddly for an instant, with his battered hat in one hand and the pot of pansies in the other, and he raised the pot of pansies very high, as though it had been a glass of rarest wine, and bowed to me as reverently as though he had been toasting me at my father’s table at some very grand dinner. And ‘Inasmuch,’ he said. Just that--‘Inasmuch.’ So that’s how I happened to go into nursing,” she finished as abruptly as she had begun. Like some wonderful phosphorescent manifestation her whole shining soul seemed to flare forth suddenly through her plain face.

With honest perplexity Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work.

“So _that’s_ how you happened to go into nursing?” she quizzed impatiently. Her long straight nose was all puckered tight with interrogation. Her dove-like eyes were fairly dilated with slow-dawning astonishment. “You--don’t--mean,” she gasped--“you don’t mean that just for _that_?” Incredulously she jumped to her feet and stood staring blankly into the city girl’s strangely illuminated features. “Well, if I were a swell like you,” she scoffed, “it would take a heap sight more than a drunken man munching pansies and rum and Bible texts to--to jolt me out of my limousines and steam-yachts and Adirondack bungalows.”

Quite against all intention, Helene Churchill laughed. She did not often laugh. Just for an instant her eyes and Zillah Forsyth’s clashed together in the irremediable antagonism of caste, the plebeian’s scornful impatience with the aristocrat equaled only by the aristocrat’s condescending patience with the plebeian.

It was no more than right that the aristocrat should recover her self-possession first.

“Never mind about your understanding, Zillah dear,” she said softly. “Your hair is the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life.”

Along Zillah Forsyth’s ivory cheek an incongruous little flush of red began to show. With much more nonchalance than was really necessary she pointed toward her half-packed trunk.

“It wasn’t Sunday-school I was coming home from when I got my motto,” she remarked dryly, with a wink at no one in particular. “And, so far as I know,” she proceeded with increasing sarcasm, “the man who inspired _my_ noble life was not in any way particularly addicted to the use of alcoholic beverages.” As though her collar was suddenly too tight, she rammed her finger down between her stiff white neck-band and her soft white throat. “He was a New York doctor,” she hastened somewhat airily to explain. “Gee! but he was a swell! And he was spending his summer holidays up in the same Maine town where I was tending soda-fountain. And he used to drop into the drug store nights after cigars and things. And he used to tell me stories about the drugs and things, sitting up there on the counter, swinging his legs and pointing out this and that--quinine, ipecac, opium, hashish--all the silly patent medicines, every sloppy soothing-syrup! Lordy! he knew ’em as though they were people--where they come from, where they’re going to, yarns about the tropics that would kink the hair along the nape of your neck, jokes about your own town’s soup-kettle pharmacology that would make you yell for joy. Gee! but the things that man had seen and known! Gee! but the things that man could make you see and know! And he had an automobile,” she confided proudly. “It was one of those billion-dollar French cars, and I lived just round the corner from the drug store; but we used to ride home by way of--New Hampshire.”

Almost imperceptibly her breath began to quicken.

“Gee! those nights!” she muttered. “Rain or shine, moon or thunder, tearing down those country roads at forty miles an hour, singing, hollering, whispering! It was him that taught me to do my hair like this instead of all the cheap rats and pompadours every other kid in town was wearing,” she asserted quite irrelevantly; then stopped with a furtive glance of suspicion toward both her listeners and mouthed her way delicately back to the beginning of her sentence again. “It was _he_ that taught me to do my hair like this,” she repeated, with the faintest possible suggestion of hauteur.

For one reason or another along the exquisitely chaste curve of her cheek a narrow streak of red began to show again.

“And he went away very sudden at the last,” she finished hurriedly. “It seems he was married all the time.” Blandly she turned her wonderful face to the caressing light. “And--I hope he goes to hell,” she added.

With a little gasp of astonishment, shock, suspicion, distaste, Helene Churchill reached out an immediate conscientious hand to her.

“O Zillah,” she began, “O poor Zillah dear! I’m so sorry! I’m so--”

Absolutely serenely, through a mask of insolence and ice, Zillah Forsyth ignored the proffered hand.

“I don’t know what particular call you’ve got to be sorry for me, Helene Churchill,” she drawled languidly. “I’ve got my character, same as you’ve got yours, and just about nine times as many good looks. And when it comes to nursing--” Like an alto song pierced suddenly by one shrill treble note, the girl’s immobile face sharpened transiently with a single jagged flash of emotion. “And when it comes to nursing? Ha! Helene Churchill, you can lead your class all you want to with your silk-lined manners and your fuddy-duddy book-talk; but when genteel people like you are moping round all ready to fold your patients’ hands on their breasts and murmur, ‘Thy will be done,’ why, that’s the time that little ‘Yours Truly’ is just beginning to roll up her sleeves and get to work.”

With real passion her slender fingers went clutching again at her harsh linen collar. “It isn’t _you_, Helene Churchill,” she taunted, “that’s ever been to the Superintendent on your bended knees and begged for the rabies cases and the small-pox! Gee! _you_ like nursing because you think it’s pious to like it; but I like it _because I like it_!” From brow to chin, as though fairly stricken with sincerity, her whole bland face furrowed startlingly with crude expressiveness. “The smell of ether,” she stammered, “it’s like wine to me. The clang of the ambulance gong? I’d rather hear it than fire-engines. I’d crawl on my hands and knees a hundred miles to watch a major operation. I wish there was a war. I’d give my life to see a cholera epidemic.”

As abruptly as it came, the passion faded from her face, leaving every feature tranquil again, demure, exaggeratedly innocent. With saccharine sweetness she turned to Rae Malgregor.

“Now, little one,” she mocked, “tell us the story of _your_ lovely life. Having heard me coyly confess that I went into nursing because I had such a crush on this world, and Helene here brazenly affirm that she went into nursing because she had such a crush on the world to come, it’s up to you now to confide to us just how you happened to take up so noble an endeavor. Had you seen some of the young house doctors’ beautiful, smiling faces depicted in the hospital catalogue? Or was it for the sake of the Senior Surgeon’s grim, gray mug that you jilted your poor plowboy lover way up in the Annapolis Valley?”

“Why, Zillah,” gasped the country girl--“why, I think you’re perfectly awful! Why, Zillah Forsyth! Don’t you ever say a thing like that again! You can joke all you want to about the flirty young internes,--they’re nothing but fellows,--but it isn’t--it isn’t respectful for you to talk like that about the Senior Surgeon. He’s too--too terrifying,” she finished in an utter panic of consternation.

“Oh, now I _know_ it was the Senior Surgeon that made you jilt your country beau,” taunted Zillah Forsyth, with soft alto sarcasm.

“I didn’t, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine,” stormed Rae Malgregor, explosively. Backed up against her bureau, eyes flaming, breast heaving, little candy-box cap all tossed askew over her left ear, she stood defying her tormentor. “I didn’t, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine,” she reasserted passionately. “It was Joe Hazeltine that jilted me; and we’d been going together since we were kids! And now he’s married the dominie’s daughter, and they’ve got a kid of their own ’most as old as he and I were when we first began courting each other. And it’s all because I insisted on being a trained nurse,” she finished shrilly.

With an expression of real shock, Helene Churchill peered up from her lowly seat on the floor.

“You mean,” she asked a bit breathlessly--“you mean that he didn’t want you to be a trained nurse? You mean that he wasn’t big enough, wasn’t fine enough, to appreciate the nobility of the profession?”

“Nobility nothing!” snapped Rae Malgregor. “It was me scrubbing strange men with alcohol that he couldn’t stand for, and I don’t know as I exactly blame him,” she added huskily. “It certainly is a good deal of a liberty when you stop to think about it.”

Quite incongruously her big childish blue eyes narrowed suddenly into two dark, calculating slits.

“It’s comic,” she mused, “how there isn’t a man in the world who would stand letting his wife or daughter or sister have a male nurse; but look at the jobs we girls get sent out on! It’s very confusing.” With sincere appeal she turned to Zillah Forsyth. “And yet--and yet,” she stammered, “and yet when everything scary that’s in you has once been scared out of you, why, there’s nothing left in you to be scared _with_ any more, is there?”

“What? What?” pleaded Helene Churchill. “Say it again! What?”

“That’s what Joe and I quarreled about, my first vacation home,” persisted Rae Malgregor. “It was a traveling salesman’s thigh. It was broken bad. Somebody had to take care of it; so I did. Joe thought it wasn’t modest to be so willing.” With a perplexed sort of defiance she raised her square little chin. “But, you see, I _was_ willing,” she said. “I was perfectly willing. Just one single solitary year of hospital training had made me perfectly willing. And you can’t _un_-willing a willing even to please your beau, no matter how hard you try.” With a droll admixture of shyness and disdain, she tossed her curly blond head a trifle higher. “Shucks!” she attested, “what’s a traveling salesman’s thigh?”

“Shucks yourself!” scoffed Zillah Forsyth. “What’s a silly beau or two up in Nova Scotia to a girl with looks like you? You could have married that typhoid case a dozen times last winter if you’d crooked your little finger. Why, the fellow was crazy about you. And he was richer than Crœsus. What queered it?” she demanded bluntly. “Did his mother hate you?”

Like one fairly cramped with astonishment, Rae Malgregor doubled up very suddenly at the waist-line, and, thrusting her neck oddly forward after the manner of a startled crane, stood peering sharply round the corner of the rocking-chair at Zillah Forsyth.

“Did his mother hate me?” she gasped. “Did--his--mother--hate me? Well, what do you think? With me, who never even saw plumbing till I came down here, setting out to explain to her, with twenty tiled bath-rooms, how to be hygienic though rich? Did his mother hate me? Well, what do you think? With her who bore him--her who _bore_ him, mind you--kept waiting down-stairs in the hospital anteroom half an hour every day on the raw edge of a rattan chair, waiting, worrying, all old and gray and scared, while little, young, perky, pink-and-white _me_ is up-stairs brushing her own son’s hair and washing her own son’s face and altogether getting her own son ready to see his own mother! And then me obliged to turn her out again in ten minutes, flip as you please, ‘for fear she’d stayed too long,’ while I stay on the rest of the night? _Did his mother hate me?_”

As stealthily as an assassin she crept around the corner of the rocking-chair and grabbed Zillah Forsyth by her astonished linen shoulder.

“Did his mother hate me?” she persisted mockingly. “Did his mother hate me? My God! Is there any woman from here to Kamchatka who doesn’t hate us? Is there any woman from here to Kamchatka who doesn’t look upon a trained nurse as her natural-born enemy? I don’t blame ’em,” she added chokingly. “Look at the impudent jobs we get sent out on! Quarantined up-stairs for weeks at a time with their inflammable, diphtheretic bridegrooms while they sit down-stairs brooding over their wedding teaspoons! Hiked off indefinitely to Atlantic City with their gouty bachelor uncles! Hearing their own innocent little sister’s blood-curdling death-bed deliriums! Snatching their own new-born babies away from their breasts and showing them, virgin-handed, how to nurse them better! The impudence of it, I say, the disgusting, confounded impudence--doing things perfectly, flippantly, _right_, for twenty-one dollars a week--and washing--that all the achin’ love in the world don’t know how to do right just for love!” Furiously she began to jerk her victim’s shoulder. “I tell you it’s awful, Zillah Forsyth,” she insisted. “I tell you I just won’t stand it!”

With muscles like steel wire, Zillah Forsyth scrambled to her feet, and pushed Rae Malgregor back against the bureau.

“For Heaven’s sake, Rae, shut up!” she said. “What in creation’s the matter with you to-day? I never saw you act so before.” With real concern she stared into the girl’s turbid eyes. “If you feel like that about it, what in thunder did you go into nursing for?” she demanded not unkindly.

Very slowly Helene Churchill rose from her lowly seat by her precious book-case and came round and looked at Rae Malgregor rather oddly.

“Yes,” she faltered, “what _did_ you go into nursing for?” The faintest possible taint of asperity was in her voice.

Quite dumbly for an instant Rae Malgregor’s natural timidity stood battling the almost fanatic professional fervor in Helene Churchill’s frankly open face, the raw scientific passion, of very different caliber, but of no less intensity, hidden craftily behind Zillah Forsyth’s plastic features; then suddenly her own hands went clutching back at the bureau for support, and all the flaming, raging red went ebbing out of her cheeks, leaving her lips with hardly blood enough left to work them.

“I went into nursing,” she mumbled, “and it’s God’s own truth--I went into nursing because--because I thought the uniforms were so cute.”

Furiously, the instant the words were gone from her mouth, she turned and snarled at Zillah’s hooting laughter.

“Well, I had to do _something_,” she attested. The defense was like a flat blade slapping the air.

Desperately she turned to Helene Churchill’s goading, faintly supercilious smile, and her voice edged suddenly like a twisted sword.

“Well, the uniforms _are_ cute,” she parried. “They are! They are! I bet you there’s more than one girl standing high in the graduating class to-day who never would have stuck out her first year’s bossin’ and slops and worry and death if she’d had to stick it out in the unimportant-looking clothes she came from home in. Even you, Helene Churchill, with all your pious talk, the day they put your coachman’s son in as new interne and you got called down from the office for failing to stand when Mr. Young Coachman came into the room, you bawled all night. You did, you did, and swore you’d chuck your whole job and go home the next day if it wasn’t that you’d just had a life-size photo taken in full nursing costume to send to your brother’s chum at Vale! So there!”

With a gasp of ineffable satisfaction she turned from Helene Churchill.

“Sure the uniforms are cute,” she slashed back at Zillah Forsyth. “That’s the whole trouble with ’em. They’re so awfully, masqueradishly cute! Sure I could have gotten engaged to the typhoid boy. It would have been as easy as robbing a babe. But lots of girls, I notice, get engaged in their uniforms, feeding a patient perfectly scientifically out of his own silver spoon, who don’t seem to stay engaged so specially long in their own street clothes, bungling just plain naturally with their own knives and forks. Even you, Zillah Forsyth,” she hacked--“even you, who trot round like the ‘Lord’s anointed’ in your pure white togs, you’re just as Dutchy-looking as anybody else come to put you in a red hat and a tan coat and a blue skirt.”

Mechanically she raised her hands to her head as though with some silly thought of keeping the horrid pain in her temples from slipping to her throat, her breast, her feet.

“Sure the uniforms are cute,” she persisted a bit thickly. “Sure the typhoid boy was crazy about me. He called me his ‘holy chorus girl.’ I heard him raving in his sleep. Lord save us! What are we to any man but just that?” she questioned hotly, with renewed venom. “Parson, actor, young sinner, old saint--I ask you frankly, girls, on your word of honor, was there ever more than one man in ten went through your hands who didn’t turn out soft somewhere before you were through with him? Mawking about your ‘sweet eyes’ while you’re wrecking your optic nerves trying to decipher the dose on a poison bottle! Mooning over your wonderful likeness to the lovely young sister they never had! Trying to kiss your finger-tips when you’re struggling to brush their teeth! Teasin’ you to smoke cigarettes with ’em when they know it would cost you your job!”

Impishly, without any warning, she crooked her knee and pointed one homely, square-toed shoe in a mincing dancing step. Hoidenishly she threw out her arms and tried to gather Helene and Zillah both into their compass.

“Oh, you holy chorus girls!” she chuckled, with maniacal delight. “Everybody all together, now! Kick your little kicks! Smile your little smiles! Tinkle your little thermometers! Steady, there! One, two, three! One, two, three!”

Laughingly, Zillah Forsyth slipped from the grasp.

“Don’t you dare ‘holy’ me!” she cried.

In real irritation Helene released herself.

“I’m no chorus girl,” she said coldly.

With a shrill little scream of pain, Rae Malgregor’s hands went flying back to her temples. Like a person giving orders in a great panic, she turned authoritatively to her two room-mates, her fingers all the while boring frenziedly into her temples.

“Now, girls,” she warned, “stand well back! If my head bursts, you know, it’s going to burst all slivers and splinters, like a boiler.”

“Rae, you’re _crazy_,” hooted Zillah.

“Just plain vulgar--loony,” faltered Helene.

Both girls reached out simultaneously to push her aside.

Somewhere in the dusty, indifferent street a bird’s note rang out in one wild, delirious ecstasy of untrammeled springtime. To all intents and purposes the sound might have been the one final signal that Rae Malgregor’s jangled nerves were waiting for.

“Oh, I _am_ crazy, am I?” she cried, with a new, fierce joy. “Oh, I _am_ crazy, am I? Well, I’ll go ask the Superintendent and see if I am. Oh, surely they wouldn’t try and make me graduate if I really was crazy!”

Madly she bolted for her bureau, and, snatching her own motto down, crumpled its face securely against her skirt, and started for the door. Just what the motto was no one but herself knew. Sprawling in paint-brush hieroglyphics on a great flapping sheet of brown wrapping-paper, the sentiment, whatever it was, had been nailed face down to the wall for three tantalizing years.

“No, you don’t!” Zillah cried now, as she saw the mystery threatening meanly to escape her.

“No, you _don’t_!” cried Helene. “You’ve seen our mottos, and now we’re going to see yours!”

Almost crazed with new terror, Rae Malgregor went dodging to the right, to the left, to the right again, cleared the rocking-chair, a scuffle with padded hands, climbed the trunk, a race with padded feet, reached the door-handle at last, yanked the door open, and with lungs and temper fairly bursting with momentum, shot down the hall, down some stairs, down some more hall, down some more stairs to the Superintendent’s office, where, with her precious motto still clutched securely in one hand, she broke upon that dignitary’s startled, near-sighted vision like a young whirlwind of linen and starch and flapping brown paper. Breathlessly, without prelude or preamble, she hurled her grievance into the older woman’s grievance-dulled ears.

“Give me back my own face!” she demanded peremptorily. “Give me back my own face, I say! And my own hands! I tell you, I want my own hands! Helene and Zillah say I’m insane! And I want to go home!”

Like a short-necked animal elongated suddenly to the cervical proportions of a giraffe, the Superintendent of Nurses reared up from her stoop-shouldered desk-work, and stared forth in speechless astonishment across the top of her spectacles.

Exuberantly impertinent, ecstatically self-conscious, Rae Malgregor repeated her demand. To her parched mouth the very taste of her own babbling impudence refreshed her like the shock and prickle of cracked ice.

“I tell you, I want my own face again, and my own hands!” she reiterated glibly. “I mean the face with the mortgage in it, and the cinders--and the other human expressions,” she explained. “And the nice, grubby country hands that go with that sort of a face.”

Very accusingly she raised her finger and shook it at the Superintendent’s perfectly livid countenance.

“Oh, of course I know I wasn’t very much to look at; but at least I matched. What my hands knew, I mean, my face knew. Pies or plowing or May-baskets, what my hands knew my face knew. That’s the way hands and faces ought to work together. But you--_you_ with all your rules and your bossing, and your everlasting ‘’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!’ you’ve snubbed all the know-anything out of my face and made my hands nothing but two disconnected machines for somebody else to run. And I hate you! You’re a monster! You’re a--Everybody hates you!”

Mutely then she shut her eyes, bowed her head, and waited for the Superintendent to smite her dead. The smite, she felt sure, would be a noisy one. First of all, she reasoned, it would fracture her skull. Naturally then, of course, it would splinter her spine. Later, in all probability, it would telescope her knee-joints. And never indeed, now that she came to think of it, had the arches of her feet felt less capable of resisting so terrible an impact. Quite unconsciously she groped out a little with one hand to steady herself against the edge of the desk.

But the blow when it came was nothing but a cool finger tapping her pulse.

“There! There!” crooned the Superintendent’s voice, with a most amazing tolerance.

“But I won’t ‘there, there!’” snapped Rae Malgregor. Her eyes were wide open again now, and extravagantly dilated.

The cool fingers on her pulse seemed to tighten a little.

“’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!” admonished the Superintendent’s mumbling lips.