Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

“But I won’t ‘’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!’” stormed Rae Malgregor. Never before in her three years’ hospital training had she seen her arch-enemy, the Superintendent, so utterly disarmed of irascible temper and arrogant dignity, and the sight perplexed and maddened her at one and the same moment. “But I won’t ‘’S-’sh! ’S-’sh!’” Desperately she jerked her curly blond head in the direction of the clock on the wall. “Here it’s four o’clock now,” she cried, “and in less than four hours you’re going to try and make me graduate, and go out into the world--God knows where--and charge innocent people twenty-one dollars a week, and washing, likelier than not, mind you, for these hands,” she gestured, “that don’t coördinate _at all_ with this face,” she grimaced, “but with the face of one of the house doctors or the Senior Surgeon or even _you_, who may be ’way off in Kamchatka when I need him most!” she finished, with a confused jumble of accusation and despair.

Still with unexplainable amiability the Superintendent whirled back into place in her pivot-chair, and with her left hand, which had all this time been rummaging busily in a lower desk drawer, proffered Rae Malgregor a small fold of paper.

“Here, my dear,” she said, “here’s a sedative for you. Take it at once. It will quiet you perfectly. We all know you’ve had very hard luck this past month, but you mustn’t worry so about the future.” The slightest possible tinge of purely professional manner crept back into the older woman’s voice. “Certainly, Miss Malgregor, with your judgment--”

“With my judgment?” cried Rae Malgregor. The phrase was like a red rag to her. “With my judgment? Great heavens! that’s the whole trouble! I haven’t got any judgment! I’ve never been allowed to have any judgment! All I’ve ever been allowed to have is the judgment of some flirty young medical student or the house doctor or the Senior Surgeon or _you_!”

Her eyes were fairly piteous with terror.

“Don’t you see that my face doesn’t know anything?” she faltered, “except just to smile and smile and smile and say ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ ‘Yes, sir’?” From curly blond head to square-toed, common-sense shoes her little body began to quiver suddenly like the advent of a chill. “Oh, what am I going to do,” she begged, “when I’m ’way off alone--somewhere in the mountains or a tenement or a palace, and something happens, and there isn’t any judgment round to tell me what I ought to do?”

Abruptly in the doorway, as though summoned by some purely casual flicker of the Superintendent’s thin fingers, another nurse appeared.

“Yes, I rang,” said the Superintendent. “Go and ask the Senior Surgeon if he can come to me here a moment, immediately.”

“The Senior Surgeon?” gasped Rae Malgregor. “The Senior Surgeon?” With her hands clutching at her throat she reeled back against the wall for support. Like a shore bereft in one second of its tide, like a tree stripped in one second of its leafage, she stood there, utterly stricken of temper or passion or any animating human emotion whatsoever.

“Oh, now I’m going to be expelled! Oh, now I know I’m going to be expelled!” she moaned listlessly.

Very vaguely into the farthest radiation of her vision she sensed the approach of a man. Gray-haired, gray-suited, as grayly dogmatic as a block of granite, the Senior Surgeon loomed up at last in the doorway.

“I’m in a hurry,” he growled. “What’s the matter?”

Precipitously Rae Malgregor collapsed into the breach.

“Oh, there’s nothing at all the matter, sir,” she stammered. “It’s only--it’s only that I’ve just decided that I don’t want to be a trained nurse.”

With a gesture of ill-concealed impatience the Superintendent shrugged the absurd speech aside.

“Dr. Faber,” she said, “won’t you just please assure Miss Malgregor once more that the little Italian boy’s death last week was in no conceivable way her fault--that nobody blames her in the slightest, or holds her in any possible way responsible?”

“Why, what nonsense!” snapped the Senior Surgeon. “What--”

“And the Portuguese woman the week before that,” interrupted Rae Malgregor, dully.

“Stuff and nonsense!” said the Senior Surgeon. “It’s nothing but coincidence, pure coincidence. It might have happened to anybody.”

“And she hasn’t slept for almost a fortnight,” the Superintendent confided, “nor touched a drop of food or drink, as far as I can make out, except just black coffee. I’ve been expecting this breakdown for some days.”

“And--the--young--drug-store--clerk--the--week--before--that,” Rae Malgregor resumed with singsong monotony.

Bruskly the Senior Surgeon stepped forward and, taking the girl by her shoulders, jerked her sharply round to the light, and, with firm, authoritative fingers, rolled one of her eyelids deftly back from its inordinately dilated pupil. Equally bruskly he turned away again.

“Nothing but moonshine!” he muttered. “Nothing in the world but too much coffee dope taken on an empty stomach--‘empty brain,’ I’d better have said. When will you girls ever learn any sense?” With search-light shrewdness his eyes flashed back for an instant over the haggard, gray lines that slashed along the corners of her quivering, childish mouth. A bit temperishly he began to put on his gloves. “Next time you set out to have a ‘brain-storm,’ Miss Malgregor,” he suggested satirically, “try to have it about something more sensible than imagining that anybody is trying to hold you personally responsible for the existence of death in the world. Bah!” he ejaculated fiercely. “If you are going to fuss like this over cases hopelessly moribund from the start, what in thunder are you going to do some fine day when, out of a perfectly clear and clean sky, security itself turns septic, and you lose the President of the United States or a mother of nine children--with a hang-nail?”

“But I wasn’t fussing, sir!” protested Rae Malgregor, with a timid sort of dignity. “Why, it never had occurred to me for a moment that anybody blamed me for anything.” Just from sheer astonishment her hands took a new clutch into the torn, flapping corner of the motto that she still clung desperately to even at this moment.

“For Heaven’s sake, stop crackling that brown paper!” stormed the Senior Surgeon.

“But I wasn’t crackling the brown paper, sir! It’s crackling itself,” persisted Rae Malgregor, very softly. The great blue eyes that lifted to his were brimming full of misery. “Oh, can’t I make you understand, sir?” she stammered. Appealingly she turned to the Superintendent. “Oh, can’t I make anybody understand? All I was trying to say, all I was trying to explain, was that I don’t want to be a trained nurse--after all.”

“Why not?” demanded the Senior Surgeon, with a rather noisy click of his glove fasteners.

“Because--my face is tired,” said the girl, quite simply.

The explosive wrath on the Senior Surgeon’s countenance seemed to be directed suddenly at the Superintendent.

“Is this an afternoon tea?” he asked tartly. “With six major operations this morning, and a probable meningitis diagnosis ahead of me this afternoon, I think I might be spared the babblings of an hysterical nurse.” Casually over his shoulder he nodded at the girl. “You’re a fool,” he said, and started for the door.

Just on the threshold he turned abruptly and looked back. His forehead was furrowed like a corduroy road, and the one rampant question in his mind at the moment seemed to be mired hopelessly between his bushy eyebrows.

“Lord!” he exclaimed a bit flounderingly, “are _you_ the nurse that helped me last week on that fractured skull?”

“Yes, sir,” said Rae Malgregor.

Jerkily the Senior Surgeon retraced his footsteps into the office and stood facing her as though with some really terrible accusation.

“And the freak abdominal?” he quizzed sharply. “Was it _you_ who threaded that needle for me so blamed slowly and calmly and _surely_, while all the rest of us were jumping up and down and cursing you for no brighter reason than that we couldn’t have threaded it ourselves if we’d had all eternity before us and all hell bleeding to death?”

“Y-e-s,” said Rae Malgregor.

Quite bluntly the Senior Surgeon reached out and lifted one of her hands to his scowling professional scrutiny.

“God!” he attested, “what a hand! You’re a wonder. Under proper direction you’re a wonder. It was like myself working with twenty fingers and no thumbs. I never saw anything like it.”

Almost boyishly the embarrassed flush mounted to his cheeks as he jerked away again. “Excuse me for not recognizing you,” he apologized gruffly, “but you girls all look so much alike!”

As though the eloquence of Heaven itself had suddenly descended upon a person hitherto hopelessly tongue-tied, Rae Malgregor lifted an utterly transfigured face to the Senior Surgeon’s grimly astonished gaze.

“Yes, yes, sir!” she cried joyously; “that’s just exactly what the trouble is; that’s just exactly what I was trying to express, sir: my face is all worn out trying to ‘look alike.’ My cheeks are almost sprung with artificial smiles. My eyes are fairly bulging with unshed tears. My nose aches like a toothache trying never to turn up at anything. I’m smothered with the discipline of it. I’m choked with the affectation. I tell you, I just can’t breathe through a trained nurse’s face any more. I tell you, sir, I’m sick to death of being nothing but a type. I want to look like _myself_. I want to see what life could do to a silly face like mine if it ever got a chance. When other women are crying, I want the fun of crying. When other women look scared to death, I want the fun of looking scared to death.” Hysterically again, with shrewish emphasis, she began to repeat: “I won’t be a nurse! I tell you I won’t! I _won’t_!”

“Pray what brought you so suddenly to this remarkable decision?” scoffed the Senior Surgeon.

“A letter from my father, sir,” she confided more quietly--“a letter about some dogs.”

“_Dogs?_” hooted the Senior Surgeon.

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. A trifle speculatively for an instant she glanced at the Superintendent’s face and then back again to the Senior Surgeon’s. “Yes, sir,” she repeated with increasing confidence, “up in Nova Scotia my father raises hunting-dogs. Oh, no special fancy kind, sir,” she hastened in all honesty to explain, “just dogs, you know; just mixed dogs, pointers with curly tails, and shaggy-coated hounds, and brindled spaniels, and all that sort of thing; just mongrels, you know, but very clever. And people, sir, come all the way from Boston to buy dogs of him, and once a man came way from London to learn the secret of his training.”

“Well, what is the secret of his training?” quizzed the Senior Surgeon with the sudden eager interest of a sportsman. “I should think it would be pretty hard,” he acknowledged, “in a mixed gang like that to decide just what particular game was suited to which particular dog.”

“Yes, that’s just it, sir,” beamed the White Linen Nurse. “A dog, of course, will chase anything that runs,--that’s just dog,--but when a dog really begins to _care_ for what he’s chasing, he--wags! That’s hunting. Father doesn’t calculate, he says, on training a dog on anything he doesn’t wag on.”

“Yes, but what’s that got to do with you?” asked the Senior Surgeon, a bit impatiently.

With ill-concealed dismay the White Linen Nurse stood staring blankly at the Senior Surgeon’s gross stupidity.

“Why, don’t you see?” she faltered. “I’ve been chasing this nursing job three whole years now, and there’s no wag to it.”

“Oh, hell!” said the Senior Surgeon. If he hadn’t said “Oh, hell!” he would have grinned. And it hadn’t been a grinny day, and he certainly didn’t intend to begin grinning at any such late hour as that in the afternoon. With his dignity once reassured, he then relaxed a trifle. “For Heaven’s sake, what _do_ you want to be?” he asked not unkindly.

With an abrupt effort at self-control Rae Malgregor jerked her head into at least the outer semblance of a person lost in almost fathomless thought.

“Why, I’m sure I don’t know, sir,” she acknowledged worriedly. “But it would be a great pity, I suppose, to waste all the grand training that’s gone into my hands.” With sudden conviction her limp shoulders stiffened a trifle. “My oldest sister,” she stammered, “bosses the laundry in one of the big hotels in Halifax, and my youngest sister teaches school in Moncton. But I’m so strong, you know, and I like to move things round so, and everything, maybe I could get a position somewhere as general housework girl.”

With a roar of amusement as astonishing to himself as to his listeners, the Senior Surgeon’s chin jerked suddenly upward.

“You’re crazy as a loon!” he confided cordially. “Great Scott! If you can work up a condition like this on coffee, what would you do on malted milk?” As unheralded as his amusement, gross irritability overtook him again. “Will--you--stop--rattling that brown paper?” he thundered at her.

As innocently as a child she rebuffed the accusation and ignored the temper.

“But I’m not rattling it, sir!” she protested. “I’m simply trying to hide what’s on the other side of it.”

“What _is_ on the other side of it?” demanded the Senior Surgeon, bluntly.

With unquestioning docility the girl turned the paper around.

From behind her desk the austere Superintendent twisted her neck most informally to decipher the scrawling hieroglyphics. “Don’t Ever Be Bumptious!” she read forth jerkily with a questioning, incredulous sort of emphasis.

“Don’t ever be _bumptious_!” squinted the Senior Surgeon perplexedly through his glass.

“Yes,” said Rae Malgregor, very timidly. “It’s my motto.”

“Your motto?” sniffed the Superintendent.

“Your motto?” chuckled the Senior Surgeon.

“Yes, my motto,” repeated Rae Malgregor, with the slightest perceptible tinge of resentment. “And it’s a perfectly good motto, too. Only, of course, it hasn’t got any style to it. That’s why I didn’t want the girls to see it,” she confided a bit drearily. Then palpably before their eyes they saw her spirit leap into ineffable pride. “My father gave it to me,” she announced briskly, “and my father said that, when I came home in June, if I could honestly say that I’d never once been bumptious all my three years here, he’d give me a heifer. And--”

“Well, I guess you’ve lost your heifer,” said the Senior Surgeon, bluntly.

“Lost my heifer?” gasped the girl. Big-eyed and incredulous, she stood for an instant staring back and forth from the Superintendent’s face to the Senior Surgeon’s. “You mean,” she stammered--“you mean that I’ve been bumptious _just now_? You mean that, after all these years of meachin’ meekness, I’ve lost?”

Plainly even to the Senior Surgeon and the Superintendent the bones in her knees weakened suddenly like knots of tissue-paper. No power on earth could have made her break discipline by taking a chair while the Senior Surgeon stood, so she sank limply down to the floor instead, with two great solemn tears welling slowly through the fingers with which she tried to cover her face.

“And the heifer was brown, with one white ear; it was awful’ cunning,” she confided mumblingly. “And it ate from my hand, all warm and sticky, like loving sand-paper.” There was no protest in her voice, or any whine of complaint, but merely the abject submission to fate of one who from earliest infancy had seen other crops blighted by other frosts. Then tremulously, with the air of one who just as a matter of spiritual tidiness would purge her soul of all sad secrets, she lifted her entrancing, tear-flushed face from her strong, sturdy, utterly unemotional fingers and stared with amazing blueness, amazing blandness, into the Senior Surgeon’s scowling scrutiny.

PFEIFER

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

“‘DON’T EVER BE _BUMPTIOUS_!’ SQUINTED THE SENIOR SURGEON PERPLEXEDLY THROUGH HIS GLASS”

DRAWN BY HERMAN PFEIFER]

“And I’d named her for you,” she said--“I’d named her Patience, for _you_!”

Instantly then she scrambled to her knees to try and assuage by some miraculous apology the horrible shock which she read in the Senior Surgeon’s face.

“Oh, of course, sir, I know it isn’t scientific,” she pleaded desperately. “Oh, of course, sir, I know it isn’t scientific at all; but up where I live, you know, instead of praying for anybody, we--we name a young animal for the virtue that that person seems to need the most. And if you tend the young animal carefully, and train it right, why--it’s just a superstition, of course, but--Oh, sir,” she floundered hopelessly, “the virtue you needed most in your business was what I meant! Oh, really, sir, I never thought of criticizing your character!”

Gruffly the Senior Surgeon laughed. Embarrassment was in the laugh, and anger, and a fierce, fiery sort of resentment against both the embarrassment and the anger, but no possible trace of amusement. Impatiently he glanced up at the fast-speeding clock.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, “I’m an hour late now!” Scowling like a pirate, he clicked the cover of his watch open and shut for an uncertain instant. Then suddenly he laughed again, and there was nothing whatsoever in his laugh this time except just amusement.

“See here, Miss--Bossy Tamer,” he said, “if the Superintendent is willing, go get your hat and coat, and I’ll take you out on that meningitis case with me. It’s a thirty-mile run, if it’s a block, and I guess if you sit on the front seat it will blow the cobwebs out of your brain--if anything will,” he finished not unkindly.

Like a white hen sensing the approach of some utterly unseen danger, the Superintendent seemed to bristle suddenly in every direction.

“It’s a bit irregular,” she protested in her most even tone.

“Bah! So are some of the most useful of the French verbs,” snapped the Senior Surgeon. In the midst of authority his voice could be inestimably soft and reassuring; but sometimes on the brink of asserting said authority he had a tone that was distinctly unpleasant.

“Oh, very well,” conceded the Superintendent, with some waspishness.

Hazily for an instant Rae Malgregor stood staring into the Superintendent’s uncordial face. “I’d--I’d apologize,” she faltered, “but I don’t even know what I said. It just blew up.”

Perfectly coldly and perfectly civilly the Superintendent received the overture.

“It was quite evident, Miss Malgregor, that you were not altogether responsible at the moment,” she conceded in common justice.

Heavily then, like a person walking in her sleep, the girl trailed out of the room to get her coat and hat.

Slamming one desk-drawer after another, the Superintendent drowned the sluggish sound of her retreating footsteps.

“There goes my best nurse,” she said grimly, “my very best nurse. Oh, no, not the most brilliant one,--I didn’t mean that,--but the most reliable, the most nearly perfect human machine that it has ever been my privilege to see turned out, the one girl that, week in, week out, month after month and year after year, has always done what she’s told, when she was told, and the exact way she was told, without questioning anything, without protesting anything, without supplementing anything with some disastrous original conviction of her own. And look at her now!” Tragically the Superintendent rubbed her hand across her worried brow. “Coffee you said it was?” she asked skeptically. “Are there any special antidotes for coffee?”

With a queer little quirk to his mouth, the gruff Senior Surgeon jerked his glance back from the open window where, like the gleam of a slim tomboyish ankle, a flicker of green went scurrying through the tree-tops.

“What’s that you asked?” he quizzed sharply. “Any antidotes for coffee? Yes, dozens of them; but none for spring.”

“Spring?” sniffed the Superintendent. A little shiveringly she reached out and gathered a white knitted shawl about her shoulders. “Spring? I don’t see what spring’s got to do with Rae Malgregor or any other young outlaw in my graduating class. If graduation came in November, it would be just the same. They’re a set of ingrates, every one of them.” Vehemently she turned aside to her card-index of names, and slapped the cards through one by one without finding one single soothing exception. “Yes, sir, a set of ingrates,” she repeated accusingly. “Spend your life trying to teach them what to do and how to do it, cram ideas into those that haven’t got any, and yank ideas out of those who have got too many; refine them, toughen them, scold them, coax them, everlastingly drill and discipline them: and then just as you get them to a place where they move like clockwork, and you actually believe you can trust them, then graduation day comes round, and they think they’re all safe, and every single individual member of the class breaks out and runs amuck with the one daredevil deed she’s been itching to do every day the last three years! Why, this very morning I caught the president of the senior class with a breakfast tray in her hands stealing the cherry out of her patient’s grape-fruit, and three of the girls reported for duty as bold as brass with their hair frizzed tight as a nigger doll’s. And the girl who’s going into a convent next week was trying on the laundryman’s derby hat as I came up from lunch. And now, now--” the Superintendent’s voice became suddenly a little hoarse--“and now here’s Miss Malgregor intriguing to get an automobile ride with _you_!”

“Eh?” cried the Senior Surgeon, with a jump. “My God! is this an insane asylum? Is it a nervine?” Madly he started for the door. “Order a ton of bromides,” he called back over his shoulder. “Order a car-load of them, fumigate the whole place with them, fumigate the whole damned place!”

Half-way down the lower hall, all his nerves on edge, all his unwonted boyish impulsiveness quenched nauseously like a candle-flame, he met and passed Rae Malgregor without a sign of recognition.

“God! How I hate women!” he kept mumbling to himself as he struggled clumsily all alone into the torn sleeve lining of his thousand-dollar mink coat.

Like a train-traveler coming out of a long, smoky, smothery tunnel into the clean-tasting light, the White Linen Nurse came out of the prudish, smelling hospital into the riotous mud-and-posie promise of the young April afternoon.

The god of hysteria had certainly not deserted her. In all the full effervescent reaction of her brain-storm, fairly bubbling with dimples, fairly foaming with curls, light-footed, light-hearted, most ecstatically light-headed, she tripped down into the sunshine as though the great harsh granite steps that marked her descent were nothing more nor less than a gigantic old horny-fingered hand passing her blithely out to some deliciously unknown Lilliputian adventure.

As she pranced across the soggy April sidewalk to what she supposed was the Senior Surgeon’s perfectly empty automobile, she became aware suddenly that the rear seat of the car was already occupied.

Out from an unseasonable snuggle of sable furs and flaming red hair a small peevish face peered forth at her with frank curiosity.

“Why, hello!” beamed the White Linen Nurse. “Who are you?”

With unmistakable hostility the haughty little face retreated into its furs and its red hair.

“Hush!” commanded a shrill childish voice. “Hush, I say! I’m a cripple and very bad-tempered. Don’t speak to me!”

“Oh, my glory!” gasped the White Linen Nurse. “Oh, my glory, glory, glory!” Without any warning whatsoever, she felt suddenly like nothing at all, rigged out in an exceedingly shabby old ulster and an excessively homely black slouch-hat. In a desperate attempt at tangible tomboyish nonchalance, she tossed her head, and thrust her hands down deep into her big ulster pockets. That the black hat reflected no decent featherish consciousness of being tossed, that the big threadbare pockets had no bottoms to them, merely completed her startled sense of having been in some way blotted right out of existence.

Behind her back the Senior Surgeon’s huge fur-coated approach dawned blissfully like the thud of a rescue-party.

But if the Senior Surgeon’s blunt, wholesome invitation to ride had been perfectly sweet when he prescribed it for her in the Superintendent’s office, the invitation had certainly soured most amazingly in the succeeding ten minutes. Abruptly now, without any greeting, he reached out and opened the rear door of the car, and nodded curtly for her to enter.

Instantly across the face of the Little Crippled Girl already ensconced in the tonneau a single flash of light went zigzagging crookedly from brow to chin, and was gone again.

“Hello, fat Father!” piped the shrill little voice. “Hello, fat Father!” So subtly was the phrase mouthed, to save your soul you could not have proved just where the greeting ended and the taunt began.

There was nothing subtle, however, about the way in which the Senior Surgeon’s hand shot out and slammed the tonneau door _bang-bang_ again on its original passenger. His face was crimson with anger. Bruskly he pointed to the front seat.

“You may sit in there with me, Miss Malgregor,” he thundered.

“Yes, sir,” crooned the White Linen Nurse.

As meek as an oiled machine she scuttled to her appointed place. Once more in smothered giggle and unprotesting acquiescence she sensed the resumption of eternal discipline. Already in just this trice of time she felt her rampant young mouth resettle tamely into lines of smug, determinate serenity. Already across her idle lap she felt her clasped fingers begin to frost and tingle again like a cheerfully non-concerned bunch of live wires waiting the one authoritative signal to connect somebody, anybody, with this world or the next. Already the facile tip of her tongue seemed fairly loaded and cocked like a revolver with all the approximate “Yes, sirs,” and “No, sirs,” that she thought she should probably need.

But the only immediate remarks that the Senior Surgeon addressed to any one were addressed distinctly to the crank of his automobile.

“Damn a chauffeur who gets drunk the one day of the year when you need him most!” he muttered under his breath, as with the same exquisitely sensitive fingers that could have dissected like a caress the nervous system of a humming-bird, or reset unbruisingly the broken wing of a butterfly, he hurled his hundred and eighty pounds of infuriate brute strength against the calm, chronic, mechanical stubbornness of that auto crank. “Damn!” he swore on the upward pull, “Damn!” he gasped on the downward push, “Damn!” he cursed and sputtered and spluttered. Purple with effort, bulging-eyed with strain, reeking with sweat, his frenzied outburst would have terrorized the entire hospital staff.

With an odd little twinge of homesickness, the White Linen Nurse slid cautiously out to the edge of her seat so that she might watch the struggle better. For thus, with dripping foreheads and knotted neck-muscles and breaking backs and rankly tempestuous language, did the untutored men-folk of her own beloved home-land hurl their great strength against bulls and boulders and refractory forest trees. Very startlingly, as she watched, a brand-new thought went zigzagging through her consciousness.

Was it possible, was it even so much as remotely possible, that the great Senior Surgeon, the great, wonderful, altogether formidable, altogether unapproachable Senior Surgeon, was just a--was just a--

Stripped ruthlessly of all his social superiority, of all his professional halo, of all his scientific achievement, the Senior Surgeon stood suddenly forth before her a mere man, just like other men. Just exactly like other men? Like the sick drug clerk? Like the new-born millionaire baby? Like the doddering old Dutch gaffer? The very delicacy of such a thought drove the blood panic-stricken from her face. It was the indelicacy of the thought that brought the blood surging back again to brow, to cheeks, to lips, even to the tips of her ears.

Glancing up casually from the roar and rumble of his abruptly repentant engine, the Senior Surgeon swore once more under his breath to think that any woman sitting perfectly idle and non-concerned in a nine-thousand-dollar car should have the nerve to flaunt such a furiously strenuous color.

Bristling with resentment and mink furs, he strode around the fender and stumbled with increasing irritation across the White Linen Nurse’s knees to his seat. Just for an instant his famous fingers seemed to flash with apparent inconsequence toward one bit of mechanism and another. Then, like a huge portentous pill floated on smoothest syrup, the car slid down the yawning street into the congested city.

Altogether monotonously in terms of pain and dirt and drug and disease the city wafted itself in and out of the White Linen Nurse’s well-grooved consciousness. From every filthy street corner sodden age or starved babyhood reached out its fluttering pulse to her. Then as suddenly sweet as a draft through a fever-tainted room, the squalid city freshened into jocund, luxurious suburbs, with rollicking tennis-courts, and flaming yellow Forsythia blossoms, and green-velvet lawns prematurely posied with pale exotic hyacinths and great scarlet splotches of lusty tulips.

Beyond this hectic horticultural outburst the leisurely spring faded out again into April’s naturally sallow colors.

As glossy and black as an endless type-writer ribbon, the narrow, tense state road seemed to wind itself everlastingly in and in and in on some hidden spool of the car’s mysterious mechanism. _Clickety-click, click, clack_, faster than any human mind could think, faster than any human hand could finger, hurtling up hazardous hills of thought, sliding down facile valleys of fancy, roaring with emphasis, shrieking with punctuation, the great car yielded itself perforce to fate’s dictation.

Robbed successively of the city’s humanitarian pang, of the suburb’s esthetic pleasure, the White Linen Nurse found herself precipitated suddenly into a mere blur of sight, a mere chaos of sound. In whizzing speed and crashing breeze, houses, fences, meadows, people, slapped across her eyeballs like pictures on a fan. On and on and on through kaleidoscopic yellows and rushing grays the great car sped, a purely mechanical factor in a purely mechanical landscape.

Rigid with concentration, the Senior Surgeon stared like a dead man into the intrepid, on-coming road.

Intermittently from her green plushy lap-robes the Little Crippled Girl struggled to her feet, and, sprawling clumsily across whosever shoulder suited her best, raised a brazenly innocent voice, deliberately flatted, in a shrill and maddeningly repetitive chant of her own making, to the effect that

“All the birds were there,
With yellow feathers instead of hair,
And bumblebees crocheted in the trees--
And bumblebees crocheted in the trees.
And all the birds were there,
And--and--”

Intermittently from the front seat the Senior Surgeon’s wooden face relaxed to the extent of a grim mouth twisting distractedly sidewise in one furious bellow:

“Will--you--stop--your--_noise_--and--go--back--to--your--seat!”

Nothing else happened at all until at last, out of unbroken stretches of winter-staled stubble, a high, formal hemlock hedge and a neat, pebbled driveway proclaimed the Senior Surgeon’s ultimate destination.

Cautiously now, with an almost tender skill, the big car circled a tiny, venturesome clump of highway violets and crept through a prancing, leaping fluff of yellow collie dogs to the door of the big stone house. Instantly from inestimable resources a liveried serving-man appeared to help the surgeon from his car, another to take his coat, another to carry his bag.

Lingering for an instant to stretch his muscles and shake his great shoulders, the Senior Surgeon breathed into his cramped lungs a friendly impulse as well as a scent of budding cherry-trees.

“You may come in with me if you want to, Miss Malgregor,” he conceded. “It’s an extraordinary case. You will hardly see another one like it.” Palpably he lowered his already almost indistinguishable voice. “The boy is young,” he confided; “about your age, I should guess, a college foot-ball hero, the most superbly perfect specimen of young manhood it has ever been my privilege to behold. It will be a long case. They have two nurses already, but would like another. The work ought not to be hard. Now, if they should happen to--fancy you!” In speechless expressiveness his eyes swept estimatingly over sun-parlors, stables, garages, Italian garden, rapturous, blue-shadowed mountain view, every last intimate detail of the mansion’s wonderful equipment.

Like a drowning man feeling his last floating spar wrenched away from him, the White Linen Nurse dug her fingernails frantically into every reachable wrinkle and crevice of the heavily upholstered seat.

“Oh, but, sir, I don’t want to go in!” she protested passionately. “I tell you, sir, I’m quite done with all that sort of thing. It would break my heart. It would--oh, sir, this worrying about people for whom you’ve got no affection, it’s like sledding without any snow! It grits right down on your naked nerves. It--”

Before the Senior Surgeon’s glowering, incredulous stare her heart began to plunge and pound again, but it plunged and pounded no harder, she realized suddenly, than when in the calm, white hospital precincts she was obliged to pass his terrifying presence in the corridor and murmur an inaudible “Good morning” or “Good evening.” “After all, he’s nothing but a man, nothing but a man, nothing but a mere, ordinary, two-legged man,” she reasoned over and over to herself. With a really desperate effort she smoothed her frightened face into an expression of utter guilelessness and peace, and smiled unflinchingly right into the Senior Surgeon’s rousing anger as she had once seen an animal trainer smile into the snarl of a crouching tiger.

“Th--ank you very much,” she said: “but I think I won’t go in, sir, thank you! My--my face is still pretty tired.”

“Idiot!” snapped the Senior Surgeon as he turned on his heel and started up the steps.

From the green plushy robes on the back seat the White Linen Nurse could have sworn that she heard a sharply ejaculated, maliciously joyful “Ha!” piped out. But when both she and the Senior Surgeon turned sharply round to make sure, the Little Crippled Girl, in apparently complete absorption, sat amiably extracting tuft after tuft of fur from the thumb of one big sable glove, to the rumbling, singsong monotone of “He loves me, loves me not, loves me, loves me not.”

Bristling with unutterable contempt for all femininity, the Senior Surgeon proceeded on up the steps between two solemn-faced lackeys.

“Father!” wailed a feeble little voice. “Father!” There was no shrillness in the tone now, or malice, or any mischievous thing; just desolation, the impulsive, panic-stricken desolation of a little child left suddenly alone with a stranger. “Father!” the frightened voice ventured forth a tiny bit louder. But the unheeding Senior Surgeon had already reached the piazza. “_Fat_ Father!” screamed the little voice. Barbed now like a shark-hook, the phrase ripped through the Senior Surgeon’s dormant sensibilities. As one fairly yanked out of his thoughts, he whirled around in his tracks.

“What do you want?” he thundered.

Helplessly the Little Girl sat staring from a lackey’s ill-concealed grin to her father’s smoldering fury. Quite palpably she began to swallow with considerable difficulty. Then as quick as a flash a diminutively crafty smile crooked across one corner of her mouth.

“Father,” she improvised dulcetly--“Father, may--may I sit in the White Linen Nurse’s lap?”

Just for an instant the Senior Surgeon’s narrowing eyes probed mercilessly into the reekingly false little smile. Then altogether brutally he shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t care where in thunder you sit,” he muttered, and went on into the house.

With an air of unalterable finality the massive oak door closed after him. In the resonant click of its latch the great wrought-iron lock seemed to smack its lips with ineffable satisfaction.

Wringing suddenly round with a whish of starched skirts, the White Linen Nurse knelt up in her seat and grinned at the Little Crippled Girl.

“Ha, _yourself_!” she said.

Against all possible expectancy, the Little Crippled Girl burst out laughing. The laugh was wild, ecstatic, extravagantly boisterous, yet awkward withal, and indescribably bumpy, like the first flight of a cage-cramped bird.

Quite abruptly the White Linen Nurse sat down again, and began nervously with the wrist of her chamois glove to polish the slightly tarnished brass lamp at her elbow. Equally abruptly after a minute she stopped polishing and looked back at the Little Crippled Girl.

“Would--you--like--to sit in my lap?” she queried conscientiously.

Insolent with astonishment, the Little Crippled Girl parried the question.

“Why in thunder should I want to sit in your lap?” she quizzed harshly. Every accent of her voice, every remotest intonation, was like the Senior Surgeon’s at his worst. The suddenly forked eyebrow, the snarling twitch of the upper lip, turned the whole delicate little face into a grotesque but desperately unconscious caricature of the grim-jawed father.

As though the father himself had snubbed her for some unimaginable familiarity, the White Linen Nurse winced back in hopeless confusion. Just for sheer shock, short-circuited with fatigue, a big tear rolled slowly down one pink cheek.

Instantly to the edge of her seat the Little Girl jerked herself forward.

“_Don’t_ cry, Pretty!” she whispered. “_Don’t_ cry! It’s my legs. I’ve got fat iron braces on my legs, and people don’t like to hold me.”

Half the professional smile came flashing back to the White Linen Nurse’s mouth.

“Oh, I just adore holding people with iron braces on their legs,” she affirmed, and, leaning over the back of the seat, proceeded with absolutely perfect mechanical tenderness to gather the poor, puny, surprised little body into her own strong, shapely arms. Then dutifully snuggling her shoulder to meet the stubborn little shoulder that refused to snuggle to it, and dutifully easing her knees to suit the stubborn little knees that refused to be eased, she settled down resignedly in her seat again to await the return of the Senior Surgeon. “There! there! there!” she began quite instinctively to croon and pat.

“_Don’t_ say ‘There! there!’” wailed the Little Girl, peevishly. Her body was suddenly stiff as a ramrod. “_Don’t_ say ‘There! there!’ If you’ve got to make any noise at all, say ‘Here! here!’”

“Here! here!” droned the White Linen Nurse. “Here! here! here! here!” On and on and interminably on, “Here! here! here! here!”

At the end of about the three hundred and forty-seventh “Here!” the Little Girl’s body relaxed, and she reached up two fragile fingers to close the White Linen Nurse’s mouth. “There, that will do,” she sighed contentedly. “I feel better now. Father does tire me so.”

“Father tires _you_?” gasped the White Linen Nurse. The giggle that followed the gasp was not in the remotest degree professional. “Father tires you?” she repeated accusingly. “Why, you silly Little Girl, can’t you see it’s you that makes father so everlastingly tired?” Impulsively with her one free hand she turned the Little Girl’s listless face to the light. “What makes you call your nice father ‘fat father’?” she asked with real curiosity. “What makes you? He isn’t fat at all. He’s just big. Why, whatever possesses you to call him ‘fat father,’ I say? Can’t you see how mad it makes him?”

“Why, of course it makes him mad,” said the Little Girl, with plainly reviving interest. Thrilled with astonishment at the White Linen Nurse’s apparent stupidity, she straightened up perkily, with inordinately sparkling eyes. “Why, of course it makes him mad,” she explained briskly. “That’s why I do it. Why, my parpa never even looks at me unless I make him mad.”

“’S-’sh!” said the White Linen Nurse. “Why, you mustn’t ever say a thing like that! Why, your marma wouldn’t like you to say a thing like that.”

Jerking bumpily back against the White Linen Nurse’s unprepared shoulder, the Little Girl prodded a pallid finger-tip into the White Linen Nurse’s vivid cheek. “Silly pink-and-white nursie!” she chuckled, “don’t you know there _isn’t_ any marma?” Cackling with delight over her own superior knowledge, she folded her little arms and began to rock herself convulsively to and fro.

“Why, _stop_!” cried the White Linen Nurse, “now you stop! Why, you wicked little creature, laughing like that about your poor dead mother! Why, just think how bad it would make your poor parpa feel!”

With instant sobriety the Little Girl stopped rocking, and stared perplexedly into the White Linen Nurse’s shocked eyes. Her own little face was all wrinkled up with earnestness.

“But the parpa didn’t like the marma,” she explained painstakingly. “The parpa never liked the marma. That’s why he doesn’t like me, I heard cook telling the iceman once, when I wasn’t more than ten minutes old.”

Desperately, with one straining hand, the White Linen Nurse stretched her fingers across the Little Girl’s babbling mouth. Equally desperately, with the other hand, she sought to divert the Little Girl’s mind by pushing the fur cap back from her frizzy red hair, and loosening her sumptuous coat, and jerking down vainly across two painfully obtrusive white ruffles the awkwardly short, hideously bright little purple dress.

“I think your cap is too hot,” she began casually, and then proceeded with increasing vivacity and conviction to the objects that worried her most. “And those--those ruffles,” she protested; “they don’t look a bit nice being so long.” Resentfully she rubbed an edge of the purple dress between her fingers. “And a little girl like you, with such bright-red hair, ought not to wear purple,” she admonished with real concern. “Now, whites and blues, and little soft pussy-cat grays--”

Mumblingly through her finger-muzzled mouth, the Little Girl burst into explanations again.

“Oh, but when I wear gray,” she persisted, “the parpa never sees me; but when I wear purple he cares, he cares most awfully,” she boasted with a bitter sort of triumph. “Why, when I wear purple, and frizz my hair hard enough, no matter who’s there, or anything, he’ll stop right off short in the middle of whatever he’s doing, and rear right up so perfectly beautiful and mad and glorious, and holler right out, ‘For Heaven’s sake, take that colored Sunday supplement away!’”

“Your father’s nervous,” suggested the White Linen Nurse.

Almost tenderly the Little Girl reached up and drew the White Linen Nurse’s ear close down to her own snuggling lips.

“Damned nervous,” she confided laconically.

Quite against all intention, the White Linen Nurse giggled. Floundering to recover her dignity, she plunged into a new error. “Poor little dev--” she began.

“Yes,” sighed the Little Girl, complacently, “that’s just what the parpa calls me.” Fervidly she clasped her little hands together. “Yes, if I can only make him mad enough daytimes,” she asserted, “then at night, when he thinks I’m asleep, he comes and stands by my cribbyhouse like a great black shadow-bear, and shakes and shakes his most beautiful head and says, ‘Poor little devil! poor little devil!’ Oh, if I can only make him mad enough daytimes!” she cried out ecstatically.

“Why, you naughty little thing!” scolded the White Linen Nurse, with an unmistakable catch in her voice. “Why, you naughty, naughty little thing!”

Like the brush of a butterfly’s wing, the child’s hand grazed the White Linen Nurse’s cheek.

“I’m a lonely little thing,” she confided wistfully. “Oh, I’m an awfully lonely little thing!” With really shocking abruptness the old malicious smile came twittering back to her mouth. “But I’ll get even with the parpa yet,” she threatened joyously, reaching out with pliant fingers to count the buttons on the White Linen Nurse’s dress. “Oh, I’ll get even with the parpa yet!” In the midst of the passionate assertion her rigid little mouth relaxed in a most mild and innocent yawn.

“Oh, of course,” she yawned, “on wash-days and ironing-days and every other workday in the week he has to be away cutting up people, ’cause that’s his lawful business; but Sundays, when he doesn’t really need to at all, he goes off to some kind of a green, grassy club all day long and plays golf.” Very palpably her eyelids began to droop. “Where was I?” she asked sharply. “Oh, yes, ‘the green, grassy club.’ Well, when I die,” she faltered, “I’m going to die specially on some Sunday when there’s a big golf game, so he’ll just naturally have to give it up and stay home and amuse me--and help arrange the flowers. The parpa’s crazy about flowers. So am I,” she added broodingly. “I raised almost a geranium once. But the parpa threw it out. It was a good geranium, too. All it did was just to drip the tiniest-teeniest bit over a book and a writing and somebody’s brains in a dish. He threw it at a cat. It was a good cat, too. All it did was to--”

A little jerkily her drooping head bobbed forward and then back again. Her heavy eyes were almost tight shut by this time, and after a moment’s silence her lips began moving dumbly like one at silent devotions. “I’m making a little poem now,” she confided at last. “It’s about--you and me. It’s a sort of a little prayer.” Very, very softly she began to repeat:

“Now I sit me down to nap,
All curled up in a nursie’s lap.
If she should die before I wake--”

Abruptly she stopped and stared up suspiciously into the White Linen Nurse’s eyes. “Ha!” she mocked, “you thought I was going to say, ‘If I should die before I wake,’ didn’t you? Well, I’m not.”

“It would have been more generous,” acknowledged the White Linen Nurse.

Very stiffly the Little Girl pursed her lips. “It’s plenty generous enough when it’s all done!” she said severely. “And I’ll thank you, Miss Malgregor, not to interrupt me again!” With excessive deliberateness she went back to the first line of her poem and began all over again:

“Now I sit me down to nap,
All curled up in a nursie’s lap.
If she should die before I wake,
Give her--give her ten cents, for anybody’s sake!”

“Why, that’s a--a cunning little prayer,” yawned the White Linen Nurse. Most certainly of course she would have smiled if the yawn hadn’t caught her first. But now in the middle of the yawn it was a great deal easier to repeat the “very cunning” than to force her lips into any new expression. “Very cunning, very cunning,” she kept crooning conscientiously.

Modestly, like some other successful authors, the Little Girl flapped her eyelids languidly open and shut for three or four times before she acknowledged the compliment. “Oh, cunning as any of ’em,” she admitted offhandishly. Only once again did she open either mouth or eyes, and this time it was merely one eye and half a mouth. “Do my fat iron braces hurt you?” she mumbled drowsily.

“Yes, a little,” conceded the White Linen Nurse.

“Ha! they hurt _me_ all the time!” gibed the Little Girl.

Five minutes later, the child who didn’t particularly care about being held, and the girl who didn’t particularly care about holding her, were fast asleep in each other’s arms, a naughty, nagging, restive little hornet all hushed up and a-dream in the heart of a pink wild-rose!

Stalking out of the house in his own due time the Senior Surgeon reared back aghast at the sight.

“Well, I’ll be hanged!” he muttered. “Most everlastingly hanged! Wonder what they think this is? A somnolent kindergarten show? Talk about fiddling while Rome burns!”

Awkwardly, on the top step, he struggled alone into his cumbersome coat. Every tingling nerve in his body, every shuddering sensibility, was racked to its utmost capacity over the distressing scenes he had left behind him in the big house. Back in that luxuriant sick-room, youth incarnate lay stripped root, branch, leaf, bud, blossom, fruit, of all its manhood’s promise. Back in that erudite library, culture personified, robbed of all its fine philosophy, sat babbling illiterate street-curses into its quivering hands. Back in that exquisite pink-and-gold boudoir, blonded fashion, ravished for once of all its artistry, ran stumbling round and round in interminable circles like a disheveled hag. In shrill crescendos and discordant basses, with heart-piercing jaggedness, with blood-curdling raspishness, each one, boy, father, mother, meddlesome relative, competent or incompetent assistant, indiscriminate servant, filing his separate sorrow into the Senior Surgeon’s tortured ears.

With one of those sudden revulsions to materialism which is liable to overwhelm any man who delves too long at a time in the brutally unconventional issues of life and death, the Senior Surgeon stepped down into the subtle, hyacinth-scented sunshine with every latent human greed in his body clamoring for expression before it, too, should be hurtled into oblivion. “Eat, damn you, and drink, damn you, and be merry, damn you, for tomorrow even _you_, Lendicott R. Faber, may have to die!” brawled and rebrawled through his mind like a ribald phonograph tune.

At the edge of the bottom step a precipitous lilac branch that must have budded and bloomed in a single hour smote him stingingly across his cheek. “Laggard!” taunted the lilac branch.

With the first crunching grit of gravel under his feet, something transcendently naked and unashamed that was neither brazen sorrow nor brazen pain thrilled across his startled consciousness. Over the rolling, marshy meadow, beyond the succulent willow-hedge that hid the winding river, up from some fluent, slim canoe, out from a chorus of virile young tenor voices, a little passionate love-song, divinely tender, most incomparably innocent, came stealing palpitantly forth into that inflammable spring world without a single vestige of accompaniment on it!

“Kiss me, Sweet, the Spring is here,
And Love is Lord of you and me.
There’s no bird in brake or brere,
But to his little mate sings he,
‘Kiss me, Sweet, the Spring is here,
And Love is Lord of you and me!’”

Wrenched like a sob out of his own lost youth, the Senior Surgeon’s faltering college memories took up the old refrain:

“As I go singing, to my dear,
‘Kiss me, Sweet, the Spring is here,
And Love is Lord of you--and me!’”

Just for an instant a dozen long-forgotten pictures lanced themselves poignantly into his brain: dingy, incontrovertible old recitation-rooms where young ideas flashed as bright and futile as parade swords; elm-shaded slopes where lithe young bodies lolled on green velvet grasses to expound their harshest cynicisms; book-history, book-science, book-economics, book-love,--all the paper passion of all the paper poets swaggering imperiously on boyish lips that would have died a thousand bashful deaths before the threatening imminence of a real girl’s kiss! Magic days, with youth the one glittering, positive treasure on the tree of life, and woman still a mystery!

“Woman a mystery?” Harshly the phrase ripped through the Senior Surgeon’s brain. Croakingly in that instant all the grim, gray scientific years re-overtook him, swamped him, strangled him. “Woman a _mystery_? O ye gods! And youth? Bah! Youth! A mere tinsel tinkle on a rotting Christmas-tree!”

Furiously with renewed venom he turned and threw his weight again upon the stubbornly resistant crank of his automobile.

Vaguely disturbed by the noise and vibration, the White Linen Nurse opened her big drowsy blue eyes upon him.

“Don’t--jerk it so!” she admonished hazily; “you’ll wake the Little Girl!”

“Well, what about _my_ convenience, I’d like to know?” snapped the Senior Surgeon, in some astonishment.

Heavily the White Linen Nurse’s lashes shadowed down again across her sleep-flushed cheeks.

“Oh, never mind about that,” she mumbled non-concernedly.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, wake up there!” bellowed the Senior Surgeon above the sudden roar of his engine.

Adroitly for a man of his bulk he ran around the radiator and jumped into his seat. Joggled unmercifully into wakefulness, the Little Girl greeted his return with a generous, if distinctly non-tactful, demonstration of affection. Grabbing the unwitting fingers of his momentarily free hand, she tapped them proudly against the White Linen Nurse’s plump pink cheek.

“See, I call her ‘Peach’!” she boasted joyously, with all the triumphant air of one who felt assured that mental discrimination such as this could not possibly fail to impress even a person as naturally obtuse as a father.

“Don’t be foolish!” snarled the Senior Surgeon.

“Who? _Me?_” gasped the White Linen Nurse, in a perfect agony of confusion.

“Yes, _you_,” snapped the Senior Surgeon, explosively, half an hour later, after interminable miles of absolute silence and dingy yellow field-stubble and bare, brown alder-bushes.

Truly out of the ascetic habit of his daily life, “where no rain was,” as the Bible would put it, it did seem to him distinctly foolish, not to say careless, not to say out and out incendiary, for any girl to go blushing her way like a fire-brand through a world so palpably populated by young men whose heads were tow, and whose hearts indisputably tinder rather than tender.

“Yes, _you_!” he reasserted vehemently, at the end of another silent mile.

Then plainly begrudging this second inexcusable interruption of his most vital musings concerning spinal meningitis, he scowled his way savagely back again into his own grimly established trend of thought.

Excited by so much perfectly good silence that nobody seemed to be using, the Little Crippled Girl ventured gallantly forth once more into the hazardous conversational land of grown-ups.

“Father,” she experimented cautiously with most commendable discretion.

Fathoms deep in abstraction, the Senior Surgeon stared unheeding into the whizzing black road. Pulses and temperatures and blood-pressures were seething in his mind; and sharp sticks and jagged stones and the general possibilities of a puncture; and murmurs of the heart and râles of the lungs; and a most unaccountable _knock-knock-knocking_ in the engine; and the probable relation of middle-ear disease; and the perfectly positive symptoms of optic neuritis; and a damned funny squeak in the steering-gear.

“Father,” the Little Girl persisted valiantly.