"What do you mean?"
"All the rest do is to scrape lint and read newspapers and potter. Why couldn't we enlist and be nurses?"
"I dare say we could."
"With white caps and big cuffs? Could we?"
Mrs. Mavering wondered at Helen's influence over her. She had watched it grow, with a half-amused curiosity. She had thought to be the girl's guide and helper, and that this new interest would be her reward upon Thaddeus's theory of commissions. But she had seemed more and more to be following, not leading; as if, in the actual onward game of life, experience, instead of a lamp before, were a lamp behind, darkening the path with the shadow of ourselves. To remember only made one irresolute. It was necessary to be young, or else to forget—at any rate, to be valiant. But had she not had enough of excitement, adventure, the ragged seams of things, variety and burlesque, and been soul-sick through it all, and fled at last from its noise and passions? She shook her head, not so much at Helen as at the other side of her own inner argument.
"Collars and cuffs, Lady Rachel! But you'd look beautiful!"
"That isn't what people want in nurses."
"It isn't? But it is! Why, if I were a man, and had you around looking like a remorseful queen who had just hung up her robe and crown on the hat-rack, and was trying to be humble with collars and cuffs, and all that, I'd get well if I were shot criss-cross. I'd say, 'This world is too fine to leave.'"
"How should you know what you would do?"
"Oh!" She hesitated, and drooped a little. "I think it was Gard said that." Then, with returned animation: "He was so funny, Lady Rachel. I asked him if he didn't think you were all that, and he only said, 'This world is too fine to leave; I think I'll stay quite a while.'"