Hilda looked up at her calmly. “Not in the least,” she answered. “I have nursed hundreds of cases.”
“Oh, my, how dreadful! And never caught it?”
“Never. I am not afraid, you see.”
“I wish I wasn't! Hundreds of cases! It makes one ill to think of it!... And all successfully?”
“Almost all of them.”
“You don't tell your patients stories when they're ill about your other cases who died, do you?” Lady Meadowcroft went on, with a quick little shudder.
Hilda's face by this time was genuinely sympathetic. “Oh, never!” she answered, with truth. “That would be very bad nursing! One's object in treating a case is to make one's patient well; so one naturally avoids any sort of subject that might be distressing or alarming.”
“You really mean it?” Her face was pleading.
“Why, of course. I try to make my patients my friends; I talk to them cheerfully; I amuse them and distract them; I get them away, as far as I can, from themselves and their symptoms.”
“Oh, what a lovely person to have about one when one's ill!” the languid lady exclaimed, ecstatically. “I SHOULD like to send for you if I wanted nursing! But there—it's always so, of course, with a real lady; common nurses frighten one so. I wish I could always have a lady to nurse me!”