Fetzer corrected her but once. At her suggestion Ellen bought a winter dress and hat and coat, and when the new dress came home, she put it on and inspected herself in the glass. The view did not satisfy her. She studied her profile, then she unbraided her thick hair and coiled it loosely on the top of her head. Ringlets escaped and curled back on her neck and over her forehead, low and broad and white, without wrinkle, like the favorite forehead of mediæval romance. She put on her dress again and smiled and flushed as she did long ago when she studied the effect of her red necktie.
Fetzer flushed, but she did not smile. She laced and interlaced her fingers and exhibited an uneasiness apparently inappropriate to the occasion. Like Stephen, she misunderstood entirely the vagaries of Hilda's mind.
"I hardly knew you! It's all right for you and me when we're by ourselves, but not for about your work. It's too fancy."
Ellen smiled and braided her hair in the old fashion at the back of her head.
In mid-January Fetzer received the cablegram for which she had been watching, and immediately the machinery of the establishment, so carefully oiled and inspected, began to revolve. She remained cool, though great matters waited upon her word.
The doors were opened into the beautiful rooms and were left open, shades were lifted, sunshine streamed in where it had been long excluded, potted plants were set in jardinières, magazines were arranged in orderly rows on the library table, fires were laid and bells were tested. Even the odor of the house changed; the faint mustiness vanished, and a sensitive Ellen sniffed with delight the fragrance of flowers and the scents of fine soaps placed by her in tiled bathrooms.
Through a door under the stairway drifted a new odor, the faint, pleasant smell of drugs. Sent to the offices she trembled with a sad and reminiscent delight. There were three large rooms in line—a waiting-room with comfortable chairs and books and plants and a canary in a sunny window, an office with three desks and tall filing-cabinets, and beyond an examining-room from which opened a little laboratory. In the second room a short, middle-aged woman in a blue serge dress stood before a filing-cabinet; in the third a tall nurse in a white uniform was in the act of mounting a stepladder before one of many cupboards.
"Are you Ellen?" the nurse called from the ladder. "I'm Miss Knowlton and that is Miss MacVane. Fetzer says you work quietly and you don't drop things. Those are fine compliments from her."
Ellen smiled. Miss MacVane lifted her head and glanced in her direction, then bent closer to her work. Ellen went into the inner room and held out her hands for the bottles.