"'Oh, John,' she broke down and cried. 'They're talking horribly! It doesn't seem possible! But why isn't she more careful?'
"Well, there's no good going into that much further. It was a very unpleasant business. He was a pig-headed parson who wouldn't look after his own, and she, I thought, till my wife finally persuaded her to call me in, was simply one of those women who have mistaken their natural vocation. They hadn't been in the town long and they didn't stay long, for as soon as I really understood her I put her into a sanitarium—the sanitarium boom had just begun, then—and he went into the Salvation Army. He'd got his eyes opened, I fancy, and he made a great success in Chicago; he told me he never wanted to see another fashionable congregation in his life—said they were sinks of iniquity. But I don't think there was ever anything actually iniquitous in that business—it hadn't got that far. Only for a clergyman's family, of course ...
"You see, I got her out in time. Ugh! It makes me sick to think of it! She was a nervous wreck.
"That was the first time that Miss Jessop ever went back on me. She was a trained nurse not long out of the training school, and nurses were scarcer, then. A handsome, plucky creature—we worked together for years, and I got to depend a good deal on her. But after a week of the parson's wife she flounced in on me with that regular bronze-mule look of hers and informed me she was leaving the next day—she had to go back East, home, she said.
"I reasoned a bit with her—she had a great influence on women, Jessop, but it was no use.
"'There are two good nurses for to-morrow, doctor,' she said, 'I happen to know. I'd rather not argue about it. I'm tired. I need a change. I've had no vacation this year. And that woman would be better off in a hospital, anyway.'
"I was cross, and I kept my patient in her own house. I thought she wasn't fit to move.
"'I believe I'm going mad!' she used to tell me, with that glitter in the eye—gives the effect of a rearing horse—perfectly symptomatic. 'I tell you I'm not responsible, doctor, for what I do! You must keep me away from—people. But don't leave me alone—oh, don't leave me alone! Why don't the women come to see me? Oh, I can't stay alone!'
"And so on, and so on. It poured out in the regular way—how the poor things spend themselves!—and I listened to it all. They're perfectly typical under those circumstances, but one phrase struck me:
"'I have fought— Oh, I have fought! It's killing me, but I have fought!'