"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!"
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 plow-boy 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 blonde 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 Croesus. 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 bathrooms 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 ante-room-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 upstairs-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!"
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? Well rather! 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 upstairs for weeks at a time with their inflammable, diphtheritic 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 sisters' blood-curdling deathbed 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-five 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.