I believe I am the most fastidious creature in the world. Sick-rooms with their intolerable smells of camphor, and vinegar and mustard, their gloom and their whines and their groans, actually make me shudder. But was it not just such fastidiousness that made Cha-no, I won't utter his name——that made somebody weary of my possibilities? And has that terrible lesson really done me no good?
JAN. 26.-No sooner had I written the above than I scrambled into my cloak and bonnet, and flew, on the wings of holy indignation, to Susan Green. Such wings fly fast, and got me a little out of breath. I found her lying on that nice white bed of hers, in a frilled cap and night-gown. It seems she fell from her ladder in climbing to the dismal den where she sleeps, and lay all night in great distress with some serious internal injury. I found her groaning and complaining in a fearful way.
"Are you in such pain?" I asked, as kindly as I could.
"It isn't the pain," she said, "it isn't the pain. It's the way my nice bed is going to wreck and ruin, and the starch all getting out of my frills that I fluted with my own hands. And the doctor's bill, and the medicines; oh, dear, dear, dear!"
Just then the doctor came in. After examining her, he said to a woman who seemed to have charge of her:
"Are you the nurse?"
"Oh, no, I only stepped in to see what I could do for her."
"Who is to be with her to-night, then?"
Nobody knew.
"I will send a nurse, then," he said. "But some one else will be needed also," he added, looking at me.