“With my judgment?” cried Rae Malgregor. The phrase was like a red rag to her. “With my judgment? Great heavens! that’s the whole trouble! I haven’t got any judgment! I’ve never been allowed to have any judgment! All I’ve ever been allowed to have is the judgment of some flirty young medical student or the house doctor or the Senior Surgeon or you!”
Her eyes were fairly piteous with terror.
“Don’t you see that my face doesn’t know anything?” she faltered, “except just to smile and smile and smile and say ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ ‘Yes, sir’?” From curly blond head to square-toed, common-sense shoes her little body began to quiver suddenly like the advent of a chill. “Oh, what am I going to do,” she begged, “when I’m ’way off alone—somewhere in the mountains or a tenement or a palace, and something happens, and there isn’t any judgment round to tell me what I ought to do?”
Abruptly in the doorway, as though summoned by some purely casual flicker of the Superintendent’s thin fingers, another nurse appeared.
“Yes, I rang,” said the Superintendent. “Go and ask the Senior Surgeon if he can come to me here a moment, immediately.”
“The Senior Surgeon?” gasped Rae Malgregor. “The Senior Surgeon?” With her hands clutching at her throat she reeled back against the wall for support. Like a shore bereft in one second of its tide, like a tree stripped in one second of its leafage, she stood there, utterly stricken of temper or passion or any animating human emotion whatsoever.
“Oh, now I’m going to be expelled! Oh, now I know I’m going to be expelled!” she moaned listlessly.
Very vaguely into the farthest radiation of her vision she sensed the approach of a man. Gray-haired, gray-suited, as grayly dogmatic as a block of granite, the Senior Surgeon loomed up at last in the doorway.
“I’m in a hurry,” he growled. “What’s the matter?”