As a matter of fact it was Charlotta who soon knew more of the history of the present group of Red Cross girls than any one of their number had ever formerly known.
Both Mildred Thornton and Nona Davis told her of their own engagements, perhaps unwisely sympathizing with the difference in their own futures and hers.
Bianca Zoli spared nothing of her past save the betrayal of her country's secrets by her Italian mother, a fact to which she never alluded.
Sonya even discovered herself relating anecdotes of her own somewhat long and checkered career for the benefit of the newcomer who was at once the guest of the hospital and its hostess. She even spoke of her recent marriage to Dr. David Clark and the fact that his Red Cross unit would establish a hospital in one of the old castles on the Rhine as soon as the American Army of Occupation were in possession of Coblenz.
Ruth Carroll reported that she had not so interesting a story to tell as she knew the little countess would have liked to hear. Her life had been fairly prosaic; her father was a country doctor in a little Kentucky town and she had never left home until the interest in the war led her to study nursing and later to join the Red Cross service in France.
Regardless of Charlotta's openly expressed unbelief, Ruth insisted that never in her life, not even as a little girl, had she possessed a real admirer.
In compensation Ruth could only declare that if Theodosia Thompson cared to tell of her past it would form a contrast to her own humdrum tale.
It chanced that Bianca Zoli was also in the little countess's room when one evening after supper Theodosia dropped in to rest and talk before going upstairs to bed.
Her duties were over for the day and it seemed to both the other girls that she appeared tired and cross. Yet the work at the hospital at present was not severe. Most of the American soldiers, who had suffered attacks of influenza on their eastward march, were now nearly well, while a few of them had already left the hospital at Luxemburg for one of the convalescent hospitals in southern France.
In their brief acquaintance Bianca and Charlotta had become intimate friends, for one reason because Bianca had more time to devote to her than the regular Red Cross nurses. But there was another strange bond in the difference in their temperaments, since concealment of her emotions was the habit of Bianca's life, while Charlotta apparently never concealed anything.