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 quite 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.
"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 blonde 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-five dollars a week and washing, likelier than not, mind you, for these hands," she gestured, "that don't co-ordinate 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 blonde head to square-toed, commonsense 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-bearded, gray-suited, 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 break-down for some days."
"And-the-young-drug-store-clerk-the-week-before-that," Rae Malgregor resumed with sing-song monotony.
Brusquely 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 brusquely 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 searchlight 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!"