CHAPTER XVI
"For real emergencies," Doctor Ledyard once remarked to Helen Travers, "give me the nervous, high-strung women. They come through shock and danger better, they hold to a climax more steadily. Your phlegmatic woman goes to pieces because she hasn't imagination and vision enough to carry her over the present."
This reasoning caused him to select Priscilla Glenn for one of the most critical operations he had ever performed. Among the blue and white nurses of his knowledge this girl with the strange, uplifted expression of face; this girl who was actually on the lookout for experience and practice, and who seriously loved her profession, stood in a class by herself. He had long had his eye upon her, had meant to single her out. And now the opportunity had come.
Perhaps the most important man in business circles, certainly one of the richest men in the city, had come to that period of his life's career when he must pay toll for the things he had done and left undone in his past. The broad, common gateway gaped wide for him, and only one chance presented itself as a possible means of holding him back from the long journey he so shudderingly contemplated.
"One chance in ten?" he questioned.
"One—in——" Ledyard had hesitated.
"A hundred?"
"A thousand."
A breathless pause followed. Then:
"And if I do not take it, how long?"