With a queer little quirk to his mouth, the gruff Senior Surgeon jerked his glance back from the open window where, like the gleam of a slim tomboyish ankle, a flicker of green went scurrying through the tree-tops.
“What’s that you asked?” he quizzed sharply. “Any antidotes for coffee? Yes, dozens of them; but none for spring.”
“Spring?” sniffed the Superintendent. A little shiveringly she reached out and gathered a white knitted shawl about her shoulders. “Spring? I don’t see what spring’s got to do with Rae Malgregor or any other young outlaw in my graduating class. If graduation came in November, it would be just the same. They’re a set of ingrates, every one of them.” Vehemently she turned aside to her card-index of names, and slapped the cards through one by one without finding one single soothing exception. “Yes, sir, a set of ingrates,” she repeated accusingly. “Spend your life trying to teach them what to do and how to do it, cram ideas into those that haven’t got any, and yank ideas out of those who have got too many; refine them, toughen them, scold them, coax them, everlastingly drill and discipline them: and then just as you get them to a place where they move like clockwork, and you actually believe you can trust them, then graduation day comes round, and they think they’re all safe, and every single individual member of the class breaks out and runs amuck with the one daredevil deed she’s been itching to do every day the last three years! Why, this very morning I caught the president of the senior class with a breakfast tray in her hands stealing the cherry out of her patient’s grape-fruit, and three of the girls reported for duty as bold as brass with their hair frizzed tight as a nigger doll’s. And the girl who’s going into a convent next week was trying on the laundryman’s derby hat as I came up from lunch. And now, now—” the Superintendent’s voice became suddenly a little hoarse—“and now here’s Miss Malgregor intriguing to get an automobile ride with you!”
“Eh?” cried the Senior Surgeon, with a jump. “My God! is this an insane asylum? Is it a nervine?” Madly he started for the door. “Order a ton of bromides,” he called back over his shoulder. “Order a car-load of them, fumigate the whole place with them, fumigate the whole damned place!”
Half-way down the lower hall, all his nerves on edge, all his unwonted boyish impulsiveness quenched nauseously like a candle-flame, he met and passed Rae Malgregor without a sign of recognition.
“God! How I hate women!” he kept mumbling to himself as he struggled clumsily all alone into the torn sleeve lining of his thousand-dollar mink coat.
Like a train-traveler coming out of a long, smoky, smothery tunnel into the clean-tasting light, the White Linen Nurse came out of the prudish, smelling hospital into the riotous mud-and-posie promise of the young April afternoon.
The god of hysteria had certainly not deserted her. In all the full effervescent reaction of her brain-storm, fairly bubbling with dimples, fairly foaming with curls, light-footed, light-hearted, most ecstatically light-headed, she tripped down into the sunshine as though the great harsh granite steps that marked her descent were nothing more nor less than a gigantic old horny-fingered hand passing her blithely out to some deliciously unknown Lilliputian adventure.
As she pranced across the soggy April sidewalk to what she supposed was the Senior Surgeon’s perfectly empty automobile, she became aware suddenly that the rear seat of the car was already occupied.
Out from an unseasonable snuggle of sable furs and flaming red hair a small peevish face peered forth at her with frank curiosity.