The outbreak of war swung her from this world of books into life and a phase of life then strange enough to any of us.
She was seventeen when she started work as a V.A.D. and eighteen when she received her eventual discharge with the infraction of every rule to her discredit. In her first round with discipline that unimaginative force had won. She spent a night of tears and abasement, feeling that to have her way, she had failed her country and her class.
But the votaries of Romance are not easily, if indeed they are ever, discouraged. The next morning she joined a volunteer Red Cross column, which a wealthy humanitarian was raising for service with the Russian Armies.
In those days we still believed, if not in the great steam roller, at least in the great soul of Russia. Our stale, materialistic civilisation was to be quickened with an air blowing cold from the steppes. The way had been shown us, our enthusiasts instanced, by the Muscovite abnegation of vodka; forgetting that a Russian is only worth listening to when he is drunk. Regeneration was dawning, convincingly enough, in the east; they little knew how red that dawn.
Norah eagerly seized the chance of reinstating herself in her own esteem. And no doubt the glamour of the country of the Tsars called her. During her months with the V.A.D. her stout heart, quick wits, and clever fingers had picked up something of war-time nursing. It is not difficult to believe that her beauty, if not her skill, was welcome to the overworked, ill-equipped French and Russian doctors, who laboured day and night behind the Russian front at the first dressing station where worked the column."
Ross hesitated.
"She told me," he said, "a good many interesting things about this experience of hers—of operations by candle-light on the kitchen tables of abandoned farms, of a long-haired pope attached to the column whom horror drove mad one night in a shattered tavern; but the story will be long enough without any picturesque extras, and we'll go straight on to the day that the Sisters, for a joke, I suppose, crossed Norah's thread with Archie's.
Archie Sinclair was not, of course, in the least like Dick Ward.
In his adventures, the male unconsciously pursues one chosen type, finding in his mates, if only for a moment, an approximation to his dreams. Just as, in a palpable desert, it is the mirage of water that men follow, ignoring other less desired deception.
Deception it is. Alone the hermits of the Thebaid attained to the achievement of temptation without realisation. Less fortunate men find in possession the denial of the dream.