The White Linen Nurse | Page 9

bluntly. "Did his mother hate
you?"
Like one fairly cramped with astonishment Rae Malgregor doubled up very suddenly at
the waist-line, and thrusting her neck oddly forward after the manner of a startled crane,
stood peering sharply round the corner of the rocking-chair at Zillah Forsyth.
"Did his mother hate me?" she gasped. "Did--his--mother--hate--me? Well, what do you
think? With me who never even saw plumbing till I came down here, setting out to
explain to her with twenty tiled bathrooms how to be hygienic though rich? Did his
mother hate me? Well, what do you think? With her who bore him, her who bore him,
mind you, kept waiting down stairs in the hospital ante-room--half an hour every day--on
the raw edge of a rattan chair--waiting--worrying--all old and gray and scared--while
little young, perky, pink and white me is upstairs--brushing her own son's hair and
washing her own son's face--and altogether getting her own son ready to see his own
mother! And then me obliged to turn her out again in ten minutes, flip as you please, for
fear she'd stayed too long,--while I stay on the rest of the night? _Did his mother hate
me!"_
Stealthily as an assassin she crept around the corner of the rocking-chair and grabbed
Zillah Forsyth by her astonished linen shoulder.
"Did his mother hate me?" she persisted mockingly. "Did his mother hate me? Well
rather! Is there any woman from here to Kamchatka who doesn't hate us? Is there any
woman from here to Kamchatka who doesn't look upon a trained nurse as her natural
born enemy? I don't blame 'em!" she added chokingly. "Look at the impudent jobs we get
sent out on! Quarantined upstairs for weeks at a time with their inflammable, diphtheritic
bridegrooms--while they sit down stairs--brooding over their wedding teaspoons! Hiked
off indefinitely to Atlantic City with their gouty bachelor uncles! Hearing their own
innocent little sisters' blood-curdling deathbed deliriums! Snatching their own new-born
babies away from their breasts and showing them, virgin-handed, how to nurse them
better! The impudence of it, I say! The disgusting, confounded impudence! Doing things
perfectly--flippantly--_right_--for twenty-five dollars a week--and washing--that all the
achin' love in the world don't know how to do right--just for love!"
Furiously she began to jerk her victim's shoulder. "I tell you it's awful, Zillah Forsyth!"

she insisted. "I tell you I just won't stand it!"
With muscles like steel wire Zillah Forsyth scrambled to her feet, and pushed Rae
Malgregor back against the bureau.
"For Heaven's sake, Rae, shut up!" she said. "What in Creation's the matter with you
to-day? I never saw you act so before!" With real concern she stared into the girl's turbid
eyes. "If you feel like that about it, what in thunder did you go into nursing for?" she
demanded not unkindly.
Very slowly Helene Churchill rose from her lowly seat by her precious book-case and
came round and looked at Rae Malgregor rather oddly. "Yes," faltered Helene Churchill.
"What did you go into nursing for?" The faintest possible taint of asperity was in her
voice.
Quite dumbly for an instant Rae Malgregor's natural timidity stood battling the almost
fanatic professional fervor in Helene Churchill's frankly open face, the raw, scientific
passion, of very different caliber, but no less intensity, hidden so craftily behind Zillah
Forsyth's plastic features. Then suddenly her own hands went clutching back at the
bureau for support, and all the flaming, raging red went ebbing out of her cheeks, leaving
her lips with hardly blood enough left to work them.
"I went into nursing," she mumbled, "and it's God's own truth,--I went into nursing
because--because I thought the uniforms were so cute."
Furiously, the instant the words were gone from her mouth, she turned and snarled at
Zillah's hooting laughter.
"Well, I had to do something!" she attested. The defense was like a flat blade slapping the
air.
Desperately she turned to Helene Churchill's goading, faintly supercilious smile, and her
voice edged suddenly like a twisted sword. "Well, the uniforms are cute!" she parried.
"They are! They are! I bet you there's more than one girl standing high in the graduating
class to-day who never would have stuck out her first year's bossin' and slops and worry
and death--if she'd had to stick it out in the unimportant looking clothes she came from
home in! Even you, Helene Churchill, with all your pious talk,--the day they put your
coachman's son in as new Interne and you got called down from the office for failing to
stand when Mr. Young Coachman came into the room, you bawled all night,--you
did,--and swore you'd chuck your whole job and go home the next day--if it wasn't that
you'd just had a life-size photo taken in full nursing costume to send to your