The White Linen Nurse | Page 7

she scoffed, "it would take a heap sight more than a
drunken man munching pansies and rum and Bible-texts to--to jolt me out of my
limousines and steam yachts and Adirondack bungalows!"
Quite against all intention Helene Churchill laughed. She did not often laugh. Just for an
instant her eyes and Zillah Forsyth's clashed together in the irremediable antagonism of
caste,--the Plebeian's scornful impatience with the Aristocrat, equaled only by the
Aristocrat's condescending patience with the Plebeian.
It was no more than right that the Aristocrat should recover her self-possession first.
"Never mind about your understanding. Zillah dear," she said softly. "Your hair is the
most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life!"
Along Zillah Forsyth's ivory cheek an incongruous little flush of red began to show. With
much more nonchalance than was really necessary she pointed towards her half-packed
trunk.
"It wasn't--Sunday school--I was coming home from--when I got my motto!" she
remarked dryly, with a wink at no one in particular. "And, so far as I know," she
proceeded with increasing sarcasm, "the man who inspired my noble life was not in any
way--particularly addicted to the use of alcoholic beverages!" As though her collar was
suddenly too tight she rammed her finger down between her stiff white neck-band and
her soft white throat. "He was a--New York doctor!" she hastened somewhat airily to
explain. "Gee! But he was a swell! And he was spending his summer holiday up in the
same Maine town where I was tending soda fountain. And he used to drop into the
drug-store, nights, after cigars and things. And he used to tell me stories about the drugs
and things, sitting up there on the counter swinging his legs and pointing out this and
that,--quinine, ipecac, opium, hasheesh,--all the silly patent medicines, every sloppy
soothing syrup! Lordy! He knew 'em as though they were people! Where they come from!
Where they're going to! Yarns about the tropics that would kink the hair along the nape
of your neck! Jokes about your own town's soup-kettle pharmacology that would make
you yell for joy! Gee! But the things that man had seen and known! Gee! But the things
that man could make you see and know! And he had an automobile," she confided
proudly. "It was one of those billion dollar French cars. And I lived just round the corner
from the drug-store. But we used to ride home by way of--New Hampshire!"

Almost imperceptibly her breath began to quicken. "Gee! Those nights!" she muttered.
"Rain or shine, moon or thunder,--tearing down those country roads at forty miles an
hour, singing, hollering, whispering! It was him that taught me to do my hair like
this--instead of all the cheap rats and pompadours every other kid in town was wearing,"
she asserted, quite irrelevantly; then stopped with a quick, furtive glance of suspicion
towards both her listeners and mouthed her way delicately back to the beginning of her
sentence again. "It was he that taught me to do my hair like this," she repeated with the
faintest possible suggestion of hauteur.
For one reason or another along the exquisitely chaste curve of her cheek a narrow streak
of red began to show again.
"And he went away very sudden at the last," she finished hurriedly. "It seems he was
married all the time." Blandly she turned her wonderful face to the caressing light.
"And--I hope he goes to Hell!" she added perfectly simply.
With a little gasp of astonishment, shock, suspicion, distaste, Helene Churchill reached
out an immediate conscientious hand to her.
"Oh, Zillah!" she began. "Oh, poor Zillah dear! I'm so--sorry! I'm so--"
Absolutely serenely, through a mask of insolence and ice, Zillah Forsyth ignored the
proffered hand.
"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