The White Linen Nurse | Page 6

What's 'nice'?" she persisted a little lamely. Then suddenly all the
pertness within her crumbled into nothingness. "That's--the--whole trouble with you,
Zillah Forsyth!" she stammered. "You never give a hang whether anything's nice or not;
all you care is whether it's fun!" Quite helplessly she began to wring her hands. "Oh, how
do I know which one of you girls to follow?" she demanded wildly. "How do I know
anything? How does anybody know anything?"
Like a smoldering fuse the rambling query crept back into the inner recesses of her brain
and fired once more the one great question that lay dormant there. Impetuously she ran
forward and stared into Helene Churchill's face. "How do you know you were meant to
be a Trained Nurse, Helene Churchill?" she began all over again. "How does anybody
know she was really meant to be one? How can anybody, I mean, be perfectly sure?"

Like a drowning man clutching out at the proverbial straw, she clutched at the parchment
in Helene Churchill's hand. "I mean--where did you get your motto, Helene Churchill?"
she persisted with increasing irritability. "If--you don't tell me--I'll tear the whole thing to
pieces!"
With a startled frown Helene Churchill jerked back out of reach. "What's the matter with
you, Rae?" she quizzed sharply, and then turning round quite casually to her book-case
began to draw from the shelves one by one her beloved Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth,
Robert Browning. "Oh, I did so want to go to China," she confided irrelevantly. "But my
family have just written me that they won't stand for it. So I suppose I'll have to go into
tenement work here in the city instead." With a visible effort she jerked her mind back
again to the feverish question in Rae Malgregor's eyes. "Oh, you want to know where I
got my motto?" she asked. A flash of intuition brightened suddenly across her
absent-mindedness. "Oh!" she smiled, "you mean you want to know--just what the
incident was that first made me decide to--devote my life to--to humanity?"
"Yes!" snapped Rae Malgregor.
A little shyly Helene Churchill picked up her copy of Marcus Aurelius and cuddled her
cheek against its tender Morocco cover. "Really?" she questioned with palpable
hesitation. "Really you want to know? Why, why--it's rather a--sacred little story to me. I
wouldn't exactly want to have anybody--laugh about it."
"I'll laugh if I want to!" attested Zillah Forsyth forcibly from the other side of the room.
Like a pugnacious boy, Rae Malgregor's fluent fingers doubled up into two firm fists.
"I'll punch her if she even looks as though she wanted to!" she signaled surreptitiously to
Helene.
Shrewdly for an instant the city girl's narrowing eyes challenged and appraised the
country girl's desperate sincerity. Then quite abruptly she began her little story.
"Why, it was on an Easter Sunday--Oh, ages and ages ago," she faltered. "Why, I couldn't
have been more than nine years old at the time." A trifle self-consciously she turned her
face away from Zillah Forsyth's supercilious smile. "And I was coming home from a
Sunday school festival in my best white muslin dress with a big pot of purple pansies in
my hand," she hastened somewhat nervously to explain. "And just at the edge of the
gutter there was a dreadful drunken man lying in the mud with a great crowd of cruel
people teasing and tormenting him. And, because--because I couldn't think of anything
else to do about it, I--I walked right up to the poor old creature,--scared as I could
be--and--and I presented him with my pot of purple pansies. And everybody of course
began to laugh, to scream, I mean, and shout with amusement. And I, of course, began to
cry. And the old drunken man straightened up very oddly for an instant, with his battered
hat in one hand and the pot of pansies in the other,--and he raised the pot of pansies very
high, as though it had been a glass of rarest wine--and bowed to me as--reverently as
though he had been toasting me at my father's table at some very grand dinner. And
'Inasmuch!' he said. Just that,--'Inasmuch!' So that's how I happened to go into nursing!"

she finished as abruptly as she had begun. Like some wonderful phosphorescent
manifestation her whole shining soul seemed to flare forth suddenly through her plain
face.
With honest perplexity Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work.
"So that's--how you happened to go into nursing?" she quizzed impatiently. Her long,
straight nose was all puckered tight with interrogation. Her dove-like eyes were fairly
dilated with slow-dawning astonishment. "You--don't--mean?" she gasped. "You don't
mean that--just for that--?" Incredulously she jumped to her feet and stood staring blankly
into the city girl's strangely illuminated features.
"Well, if I were a swell--like you!"