With her throat parched, garments “sticky,” hair, eyes, ears and nostrils filled with irritating dust, and a feeling that collar and cuffs were, as ladies phrase it, “a sight to behold,” Rachel's heroic enthusiasm ebbed to the bottom. Ushered into the Surgeon's office she was presented to a red-faced, harsh-eyed man, past the middle age, who neither rose nor apologized to her for being discovered in the undress of a hot day. He motioned her to a seat with the wave of the fan he was vigorously using, and taking her letter of introduction, adjusted eye-glasses upon a ripe-colored nose, and read it with a scowl that rippled his face with furrows.
“So you're the first of the women nurses that's to be assigned to me,” he said ungraciously, after finishing the letter, and scanning her severely for a moment over the top of his glasses. “I suppose I have to have 'em.”
The manner hurt Rachel even more than the words. Before she could frame a reply he continued:
“I don't take much stock in this idea of women nurses, especially when they're young and pretty.” He scowled at Rachel as if she had committed a crime in being young and beautiful. “But the country's full of women with a Quixotic notion of being Florence Nightingales, and they've badgered the Government into accepting their services. I suppose I'll have to take my share of them. Ever nursed?”
“No, sir,” responded Rachel, compressing as much haughtiness as possible into the answer.
“Of course not. Girls at your age are not at all likely to know anything that is useful, and least of all how to nurse a sick man. I hardly know which is the worst, a young one who don't know anything, or a middle-aged one who thinks she knows it all, and continually interferes with the management of a case. I believe though, I'd rather have had the middle-aged one to start with. She'd be more likely to tend to her business, and not have her head turned by the attentions of the good-looking young officers who swarm around her. Mind, I'll not allow any flirting here.”
Rachel's face crimsoned. “You forget yourself,” she said, cuttingly; “or perhaps you have nothing to forget. At least, man an effort to remember that I'm a lady.”
The bristly eyebrows straightened down to a level line over the small blue eyes, and unpleasant furrows drew themselves around the corners of his mouth. “YOU forget,” he said, “that if you enter upon these duties you are in the military service and subject to your superior officers. You forget the necessity of the most rigid discipline, and that it is my duty to explain and enforce this.”
“I certainly expect to obey orders,” said Rachel, a little overawed.
“You may rightly expect to,” he answered with a slight sneer; “because it will be a matter of necessity—you will have to. We must have instant and unquestioning obedience to orders here, as well as everywhere else in the Army, or it would be like a rope of sand—of no strength whatever—no strength, whatever.”