Lily wondered very much whether anyone had ever considered Doris Dickenson to be a good nurse. She had the typical faults of the professional, and but little of her conscientiousness and enthusiasm for her work.
Lily, more than ever deficient in self-confidence through physical weakness, wondered despairingly whether it was entirely her own fault that she sometimes found Miss Dickenson almost unbearable. Was she, as Nicholas often said, hypercritical?
Things unimportant in themselves assumed monstrous proportions and took possession of her mind. Amongst them were small characteristics of Doris Dickenson.
Her flow of incessant talk, concerned almost exclusively with herself, her experiences, her relations, and her love-affairs.
The recurrence in her conversation of the particular adverb or adjective that momentarily obsessed her, regardless of its applicability.
"How devastating!" she would drawl, of a broken wine-glass, a thunderstorm, a new novel. Even a bunch of flowers was "devastatingly pretty." But the following week, the events of the hour were all "preposterous," and the word was introduced into her conversation in every impossible connection, until a fresh adjective appeared to replace it.
She also possessed to perfection the trick of the meaningless tag—of all others perhaps the most characteristic of the second-rate mind.
"Here's your medicine. I say, why do you look like that?"
And, very frequently:
"Don't say it in such a tragic voice! What makes you say it like that?"