Gloria and Treeless Street | Page 6

uncle and aunt spirited me away the next
day, and here I am in this 'Undiscovered Country'! Do you mind if I
write you? You will be too busy to answer. Maybe you won't even have
time to read it! I found out about one of your sick persons that same
day--Dinney's mother. He seemed almost proud that she had
consumption, the poor little boy! He had the baby with him. I never
saw such a perfectly dreadful street. The idea of calling it Pleasant
Street! Somebody ought to climb up and print an 'Un' before it, and
even that wouldn't be bad enough!
"I wish I knew who Rose is. All I do know is that you taught her to be
good to Hunkie--Dinney said so. He said that Rosy lived across the hall,
and that she had eyes like mine!
"Uncle Em has a protracted case here, so we may be here quite a while
longer, but when I get home will you let me go district-visiting
sometime with you? And introduce me to the girl with eyes like mine,
and whose name is Rose--my middle name. It makes me feel queer
every time I think of her--I don't know exactly how to describe it, but it
seems a little as if there were two Rose Abercrombies. Suppose I lived
down on that Un-Pleasant street--across the hall!
"Lovingly yours,
"GLORIA ROSE ABERCROMBIE."
To Gloria's surprise, she received an answer to her letter, with a
considerable degree of promptness, but it was not postmarked Tilford.
"_My dear Miss Gloria Rose_: Perhaps you didn't know District Nurses
could be prompt in answering letters! But, you see, I am having my two
weeks' vacation up here in this little hilly place. I get two weeks off
every summer--and actually sit down! I'm doing it now--if my writing

joggles now and then it is because I am rocking. I want to make the
most of my opportunities. This is the quietest place to sit and rock I
was ever in.
"Your letter was such a delightful surprise. Of course, I'll take you with
me. I'll do more than introduce you to my assistant Rose. No, I'll not
describe her to you. I will wait and let you see her for yourself. Well,
Dinney's mother is very sick. I could not bear to leave her. What do you
think she said to me the last thing? 'I'll wait'--just those two
words--when waiting will be so cruelly hard. I would not have come
now, but the doctor put his foot down. I suppose I was worn out.
"My dear, if I loved anyone very much I should say to her: 'Never be a
District Nurse!' It's so terribly hard on the heart-strings.
"There is another Dinney on Pleasant Street, but his name is Straps. I
don't know why, unless because of his one suspender, and then it ought
to be Strap. He looks like Dinney, but his 'baby' he leads by the elbow
instead of drags in a cart. The baby of Straps is very old and blind, the
shoestrings he sells on the corner are very poor ones, but when you
need shoestrings I wish you would buy those. Din--I mean
Straps--leads him back and forth and loves him. There doesn't seem any
reason in all the world why he should--or could--but he does.
"There, I must stop.
"Lovingly,
"MARY S. WINSHIP,
"District Nurse."
The letter of the District Nurse reawakened all Gloria's interest in the
street she had "discovered." She thought about it a great deal while she
and Aunt Em were driven about sightseeing. Her preoccupation was a
source of gentle worriment to Aunt Em, and would have been even
more so had that dear person suspected Gloria's designs against
Un-Pleasant Street. These designs were unbosomed in a second letter to

the District Nurse.

CHAPTER IV.
Gloria's second letter to the District Nurse ran thus:
"_Dear Miss Winship_: I keep thinking of those dreadful houses. Every
time I look in a daily paper I expect to read that one of them has
tumbled down, and I'm afraid it will be Dinney's house, where that poor,
sick woman is--or Straps' house! They ought to tumble down, every
one of them, but not till they are emptied of their poor loads of
humanity. If they are half as bad inside as they are outside! I keep and
keep thinking of them. Think of a girl named Rose being in a house like
that, and another girl with Rose for her middle name in a beautiful,
great hotel here, or Uncle Em's lovely house at home--both of them
Roses. It isn't fair!
"Do you know, I have a plan, but I'm 'most afraid to divulge it--I
wouldn't to Uncle Em for the world, yet! He'd