“Yes, I’m sure I could,” retorted Alvina. “I want to be a maternity nurse—” She looked strangely, even outrageously, at her governess. “I want to be a maternity nurse. Then I shouldn’t have to attend operations.” And she laughed quickly.
Miss Frost’s right hand beat like a wounded bird. It was reminiscent of the way she beat time, insistently, when she was giving music lessons, sitting close beside her pupils at the piano. Now it beat without time or reason. Alvina smiled brightly and cruelly.
“Whatever put such an idea into your head, Vina?” asked poor Miss Frost.
“I don’t know,” said Alvina, still more archly and brightly.
“Of course you don’t mean it, dear,” said Miss Frost, quailing.
“Yes, I do. Why should I say it if I don’t.”
Miss Frost would have done anything to escape the arch, bright, cruel eyes of her charge.
“Then we must think about it,” she said, numbly. And she went away.
Alvina floated off to her room, and sat by the window looking down on the street. The bright, arch look was still on her face. But her heart was sore. She wanted to cry, and fling herself on the breast of her darling. But she couldn’t. No, for her life she couldn’t. Some little devil sat in her breast and kept her smiling archly.
Somewhat to her amazement, he sat steadily on for days and days. Every minute she expected him to go. Every minute she expected to break down, to burst into tears and tenderness and reconciliation. But no—she did not break down. She persisted. They all waited for the old loving Vina to be herself again. But the new and recalcitrant Vina still shone hard. She found a copy of The Lancet, and saw an advertisement of a home in Islington where maternity nurses would be fully trained and equipped in six months’ time. The fee was sixty guineas. Alvina declared her intention of departing to this training home. She had two hundred pounds of her own, bequeathed by her grandfather.