The Primrose Ring | Page 5

wrenched away her hands fiercely.
"You're just like the Senior Surgeon. He thinks the whole dependent
world--the sick and the poor and the incompetent--have no business
with ideas or feelings of their own. He's always saying, 'Train it out of
them; train it out of them; and it will make it easier for institutions to
take care of them.' It's for ever the 'right of the strong' with him. Unless
you are able to take care of yourself you are not entitled to the ordinary
privileges of a human being."
"I'm not at all like the Senior Surgeon. I don't mean that, and you know
it. What I am trying to make you understand is that these kiddies can't
keep you always; some time they will have to learn to do without you.
When that happens it will come tough on them. It would come tough on

anybody; and the square thing for you to do is to stop being--so
all-fired adorable." The House Surgeon flung back his head and
marched out of the board-room, slamming the door.
Behind the slammed door Margaret MacLean eyed the primroses
suspiciously. "I wonder--is your magic working all right to-day?
Please--please don't weave any charms against him, little faery people.
He is the only other grown-up person who has ever understood the least
bit; and I couldn't bear to lose him, too."
For the second time that morning she nestled her cheek against the
blossoms. Then the clock on the hospital tower struck eight. She
jumped with a start. "Time to go on duty." Once again her eyes met the
eyes of the Founder and sparkled witchingly. She raised high the green
Devonshire bowl from the President's desk as for a toast.
"Here's to Saint Margaret's--as you founded her; and the children--as
you meant them to be; and here's to the one who first understood!" She
turned from the Founder to the portrait hanging opposite, and bowed
most worshipfully to the Old Senior Surgeon.

II
IN WHICH MARGARET MACLEAN REVIEWS A MEMORY
As Margaret MacLean climbed the stairs to Ward C--she rarely took
the lift, it was too remindful of the time when she could not climb
stairs--her mind thought back a step for each step she mounted. When
she had reached the top of the first flight she was a child again, back in
one of the little white iron cribs in her own ward; and it was the day
when the first stringent consciousness came to her that she hated
Trustee Day.
The Old Senior Surgeon--the present one, of whom Saint Margaret's
felt inordinately proud, was house surgeon then--had come into Ward C
for a peep at her, and had called out, according to a firmly established
custom, "Hello, Thumbkin! What's the news?"
She had been "Thumbkin" to him ever since the night he had carried
her into the hospital, a tiny mite of a baby; and he had woven out of her
coming a marvelous story--fancy-fashioned. This he had told her at
least twice a week, from the time she was old enough to ask for it,
because it had popped into his head quite suddenly that this morsel of
humanity would some day insist on being accounted for.

The bare facts concerning her were rather shabby ones. She had been
unceremoniously dumped into his arms by a delegate from the
Foundling Asylum, who had found him the most convenient receptacle
nearest the door; and he had been offered the meager information that
she belonged to no one, was wrong somehow, and a hospital was the
place for her.
One hardly likes to pass on shabby garments, much less shabby facts,
to cover another's past. So the Old Senior Surgeon had forestalled her
inquisitiveness with a tale adorned with all the pretty imaginings that
he, "a clumsy-minded old gruffian," could conjure up.
Margaret MacLean remembered the story--word for word--as we
remember "The House That Jack Built." It began with the Old Senior
Surgeon himself, who heard a pair of birds disputing in one of the two
trees which sentineled the hospital. They had built a nest therein; it was
bedtime, and they wished to retire, only something prevented. Upon
investigation he discovered the cause--"and there you were, my dear,
no bigger than my thumb!"
This was the nucleus of the story; but the Old Senior Surgeon had
rolled it about, hither and yon, adding adventure after adventure, until it
had assumed gigantic proportions. As she grew older she took a hand in
the adventure-making herself, he supplying the bare plot, she weaving
the threads therefrom into a detailed narrative which she retold to him
later, with a few imaginings of her own added. This is what had
established the custom for the Old Senior Surgeon to take a peep into
Ward C