“That’s one good thing,” said Frances, “one very good thing. I sometimes think I wouldn’t have made a bad woman-doctor.”
“What a horrible idea!” said Betty, with a shudder. “I hope it doesn’t mean that you ever think of becoming a hospital nurse. If you did, I should just simply drown myself, and make Eira do the same!”
“Hush!” said Frances. “Don’t say such things, even in fun. No, I’ve no ambition of the kind—not while I’ve got my own place at home, any way. But it’s rather curious you should have said that, Betty, for an idea has come into my head of something we could do for the people at Scaling Harbour, which really would cost us nothing, or next to nothing. It struck me when Mrs Ramsay”—(the ex-governess)—“sent me that commission for a few simple surgical books, to teach her to know what to do out there in case of accidents, which she says are always happening.”
“And certainly, by all accounts,” said Eira, with interest, “they are always happening at Scaling Harbour. But what is your idea?”
“It is not very definite yet,” said Frances. “Only the first steps towards it. What I am thinking of is, if we could use part of this winter, when we have so much time on our hands, for teaching ourselves the elements of surgical aid, and then when we have, to some extent, mastered it, to give simple little lectures—lessons, rather—to the fisher-women down there once a week or once a fortnight.”
Eira’s eyes brightened.
“Yes,” she said, “I would like that! There is something, I think, very attractive about those people; something a trifle wild, almost foreign. They do say, you know,” she went on, “that there’s a strain of Spanish descent among them; and, in any case, they are quite unlike the inland people about here, who are peculiarly dull and phlegmatic.”
“I should be frightened to go much among them,” said Betty.
“Possibly,” went on Frances, “we might persuade mamma to let two or three of them come up to us a few times. We could teach them a little of the practical part in the first place, and get to know them, and then they might talk about it to their neighbours. To begin with, all we want is one or two sensible books, or possibly, a set of ambulance lessons by correspondence. I think I have heard of such things.”
“They would be sure to cost a lot of money,” said Betty, who was evidently not inclined to take an optimistic view of the scheme.