Madly she bolted for her bureau, and, snatching her own motto down, crumpled its face securely against her skirt, and started for the door. Just what the motto was no one but herself knew. Sprawling in paint-brush hieroglyphics on a great flapping sheet of brown wrapping-paper, the sentiment, whatever it was, had been nailed face down to the wall for three tantalizing years.
“No, you don’t!” Zillah cried now, as she saw the mystery threatening meanly to escape her.
“No, you don’t!” cried Helene. “You’ve seen our mottos, and now we’re going to see yours!”
Almost crazed with new terror, Rae Malgregor went dodging to the right, to the left, to the right again, cleared the rocking-chair, a scuffle with padded hands, climbed the trunk, a race with padded feet, reached the door-handle at last, yanked the door open, and with lungs and temper fairly bursting with momentum, shot down the hall, down some stairs, down some more hall, down some more stairs to the Superintendent’s office, where, with her precious motto still clutched securely in one hand, she broke upon that dignitary’s startled, near-sighted vision like a young whirlwind of linen and starch and flapping brown paper. Breathlessly, without prelude or preamble, she hurled her grievance into the older woman’s grievance-dulled ears.
“Give me back my own face!” she demanded peremptorily. “Give me back my own face, I say! And my own hands! I tell you, I want my own hands! Helene and Zillah say I’m insane! And I want to go home!”
Like a short-necked animal elongated suddenly to the cervical proportions of a giraffe, the Superintendent of Nurses reared up from her stoop-shouldered desk-work, and stared forth in speechless astonishment across the top of her spectacles.
Exuberantly impertinent, ecstatically self-conscious, Rae Malgregor repeated her demand. To her parched mouth the very taste of her own babbling impudence refreshed her like the shock and prickle of cracked ice.
“I tell you, I want my own face again, and my own hands!” she reiterated glibly. “I mean the face with the mortgage in it, and the cinders—and the other human expressions,” she explained. “And the nice, grubby country hands that go with that sort of a face.”
Very accusingly she raised her finger and shook it at the Superintendent’s perfectly livid countenance.