Mrs. Witherspoon gave her a frivolous glance, and replied positively:
“I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout workin’ them new fangled things. But I’ve et from them. Eddie May, Sammy’s wife,” both of her listeners nodded, “the one what come to see me Satd’y has one. And Mr. Witherspoon seys after we went to Sammy’s Easter dinner, ‘Jennie, the only way to cook victuals is to cook ’em with the eye. Baste ’em, and taste ’em, and it’s jes’ like stokin’ an ingine,’ he seys, ‘you got to keep yo’ eye to it.’ If you know what I mean....”
This precipitated a hot argument upon washing machines, with the fat woman as the defendant. So Rose Standish shifted her attention to the clouds. If the women kept up for fifteen minutes more ... and if she knew wards they were good for hours ... the thunderstorm would be here, and they would be quieted down for the night.
She looked at her watch. It was almost nine. Time for the night nurse to be coming along, in just a few minutes. And while she was waiting for her to come and bed the ward down, she might as well begin to think about the accident room.
Those scrub-up basins should be moved across the room and as far away as possible from the door in which the accidents were brought. And then, too, some arrangement should be made to equalize the lighting over the two tables. And also to give the nurse at the instrument table enough light to see what she was handing. And in some of the badly mangled cases, it would quicken things considerably if a passageway was built directly into the elevator corridor, so that they might be hurried up to the operating room.
Then, of course it was a little thing, but awfully important nervously: the girl who took the doctors’ dictation onto the typewriter ought to have a noiseless machine. And it would be terribly hard to convince the Superintendent of Nurses, but she was going to tell Dr. MacArthur that she needed another student nurse on duty there. After a football game or a big race meet when the automobile accidents began to pour in, it was frightful. There was nobody, except the girl at the typewriter who couldn’t stop, whose hands were not all gory and spotted every paper they touched.
She was distracted by a flash of lightning, Mrs. Witherspoon’s, “Lan’ sake, nurse, I’ve wet my bed,” and Miss Kerr’s niece, the night student nurse leaning over her and purring:
“Miss Standish, are you better? Here’s your thermometer.”
Perhaps it was her voice coming so soon after the flash, but there seemed something too saccharin in its tone to Rose Standish. She shivered before she turned to take the extended thermometer.
Of course she knew Miss Kerr’s niece was the night student nurse they were watching, but somehow she didn’t associate the name and the girl. She had never liked this girl when she had been in the accident room. No real heart, and stubborn and cattish ... and then her eyes were too close together....