When the ambulance arrived, and the patient departed, the nurse began to realize that it was [Pg 217] three o'clock, and that she had had no food since seven. As the Bible-reading was at four, she had time only for a hastily swallowed cup of tea, and a slice of bread and butter, with a bit of cold meat, before the reading, after which she went home, bathed, rested, and supped, before presenting herself again at headquarters for the night duty, which called her to patrol the streets with a companion officer (a dull, rather coarse woman, who "exhorted" and sang through her nose) until after midnight.
Then she went home and to bed, inwardly thanking Heaven for her happy day. She felt, as she would have said, that she had been "awfu' favored."
CHAPTER XIV
TWO SOUL-SIDES
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| "Thanks to God, the meanest of his creatures |
| Boasts two soul-sides—one to face the world with, |
| One to show a woman when he loves her." |
A man's character is like the body of a child,—it grows unequally and in sections. Certain qualities in Flint had lain throughout these thirty-three years wholly undeveloped and unaffected by the culture of other characteristics. In his case the dormancy of the sympathetic side of his nature was no doubt largely due to the absence of those close family ties which call out in most of us our first sense of the kinship of the race.
Flint had no recollection of either father or mother, and he was an only child. On his mother's death, he was sent to the home of an uncle and aunt in Syracuse. They received him without enthusiasm, and only because it was inevitable that the child should be cared for, and there was no one else to undertake the task. Flint sometimes recalled, with a feeling [Pg 219] of bitterness against Fate, those early years of repression, when silence and self-obliteration were the only merits or attractions asked for in the orphan boy.