Looking back thus on the three spine-curving, chest-cramping, foot-twinging, ether-scented years of her hospital training, it dawned on the White Linen Nurse very suddenly that nothing of her ever had felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression.
Impulsively she sprang for the prim white mirror that capped her prim white bureau, and stood staring up into her own entrancing, bright-colored Nova Scotian reflection with tense, unwonted interest.
Except for the unmistakable smirk which fatigue had clawed into her plastic young mouth-lines, there was nothing special the matter with what she saw.
“Perfectly good face,” she attested judicially, with no more than common courtesy to her progenitors—“perfectly good and tidy-looking face, if only—if only—” her breath caught a trifle—“if only it didn’t look so disgustingly noble and—hygienic—and dollish.”
All along the back of her neck little sharp, prickly pains began to sting and burn.
“Silly—simpering—pink-and-white puppet!” she scolded squintingly, “I’ll teach you how to look like a real girl!”
Very threateningly she raised herself to her tiptoes and thrust her glowing, corporeal face right up into the moulten, elusive, quicksilver face in the mirror. Pink for pink, blue for blue, gold for gold, dollish smirk for dollish smirk, the mirror mocked her seething inner fretfulness.
“Why, darn you!” she gasped—“why, darn you—why, you looked more human than that when you left the Annapolis Valley three years ago! There were at least tears in your face then, and cinders, and your mother’s best advice, and the worry about the mortgage, and the blush of Joe Hazeltine’s kiss.”
Furtively with the tip of her index-finger she started to search her imperturbable pink cheek for the spot where Joe Hazeltine’s kiss had formerly flamed.
“My hands are all right, anyway,” she acknowledged with vast relief. Triumphantly she raised both strong, stub-fingered, exaggeratively executive hands to the level of her childish blue eyes, and stood surveying the mirrored effect with ineffable satisfaction. “Why, my hands are—dandy!” she gloated. “Why, they’re perfectly dandy! Why, they’re wonderful! Why, they’re—” Then suddenly and fearfully she gave a shrill little scream. “But they don’t go with my silly doll-face,” she cried. “Why, they don’t! They don’t! My God! they don’t! They go with the Senior Surgeon’s scowling Heidelberg eyes. They go with the Senior Surgeon’s grim, gray jaw. They go with the—Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?”