“Dear Miss Winship: My uncle and aunt spirited me away the next day, and here I am in this 'Undiscovered Country'! Do you mind if I write you? You will be too busy to answer. Maybe you won't even have time to read it! I found out about one of your sick persons that same day—Dinney's mother. He seemed almost proud that she had consumption, the poor little boy! He had the baby with him. I never saw such a perfectly dreadful street. The idea of calling it Pleasant Street! Somebody ought to climb up and print an 'Un' before it, and even that wouldn't be bad enough!
“I wish I knew who Rose is. All I do know is that you taught her to be good to Hunkie—Dinney said so. He said that Rosy lived across the hall, and that she had eyes like mine!
“Uncle Em has a protracted case here, so we may be here quite a while longer, but when I get home will you let me go district-visiting sometime with you? And introduce me to the girl with eyes like mine, and whose name is Rose—my middle name. It makes me feel queer every time I think of her—I don't know exactly how to describe it, but it seems a little as if there were two Rose Abercrombies. Suppose I lived down on that Un-Pleasant street—across the hall!
“Lovingly yours,
“GLORIA ROSE ABERCROMBIE.”
To Gloria's surprise, she received an answer to her letter, with a considerable degree of promptness, but it was not postmarked Tilford.
“My dear Miss Gloria Rose: Perhaps you didn't know District Nurses could be prompt in answering letters! But, you see, I am having my two weeks' vacation up here in this little hilly place. I get two weeks off every summer—and actually sit down! I'm doing it now—if my writing joggles now and then it is because I am rocking. I want to make the most of my opportunities. This is the quietest place to sit and rock I was ever in.
“Your letter was such a delightful surprise. Of course, I'll take you with me. I'll do more than introduce you to my assistant Rose. No, I'll not describe her to you. I will wait and let you see her for yourself. Well, Dinney's mother is very sick. I could not bear to leave her. What do you think she said to me the last thing? 'I'll wait'—just those two words—when waiting will be so cruelly hard. I would not have come now, but the doctor put his foot down. I suppose I was worn out.
“My dear, if I loved anyone very much I should say to her: 'Never be a District Nurse!' It's so terribly hard on the heart-strings.
“There is another Dinney on Pleasant Street, but his name is Straps. I don't know why, unless because of his one suspender, and then it ought to be Strap. He looks like Dinney, but his 'baby' he leads by the elbow instead of drags in a cart. The baby of Straps is very old and blind, the shoestrings he sells on the corner are very poor ones, but when you need shoestrings I wish you would buy those. Din—I mean Straps—leads him back and forth and loves him. There doesn't seem any reason in all the world why he should—or could—but he does.