"From A to Z, and inside out and I haven't got it straight yet. Why did you do it? That's what has upset them, but they don't seem to know what it was. Why did you?"
"That's what they both asked."
"Their intelligence must be looking up. I gather that you were asked to do something your conscience didn't approve and that you up and quit."
"I wasn't asked to do anything. But John Lowell isn't straight and I won't work for him."
Through her cigarette smoke, Belle stared as Hilda and James had done.
"But, kiddie, you'll never find a business man that is straight, or an office or any place where you approve of everything. How long do you think I'd be a nurse if I had to approve of everything I see in an operating room; people cut up when there's no need; often carelessness that would make your hair stand on end. My relation to the surgeon is like yours to Lowell. I hand the instruments, and keep mum."
"And I quit."
"So I hear," Belle laughed. "But what are you going to do? Ask for a certificate of conscience from your next employer? I say, sisterkin, what do you think business life is?"
"That depends on what you want to make it."
"Rot. It's compromise from dawn till dark; from the cradle to the grave. When you start out you think you're going to do wonderful things, reorganize everything and everybody, because your own pet ideals are the very finest ideals in captivity. And—in the end you're lucky if you remember what they were. Why, even I, and nobody would accuse me of being sentimental, had all kinds of ideas about what a nurse's vocation might be, a kind of etherealized Florence Nightingale in a perpetual ecstasy; but when I came up against real patients, whining nervous women and men—well, Belle Nightingale gives her pills and powders now strictly according to the doctor's orders and forgets most of her patients with the last pay check. The whole thing's like Mom's pot-roast—a good solid makeshift for something better."