Discordantly into this rapturously pagan vision of pranks and posies broke one of her room-mates all a-whiff with ether, a-whir with starch.
Instantly with the first creak of the door-handle, the White Linen Nurse was on her feet, breathless, resentful, grotesquely defiant.
“Get out of here, Zillah Forsyth!” she cried furiously. “Get out of here quick, and leave me alone! I want to think.”
Perfectly serenely the new-comer advanced into the room. With her pale, ivory-tinted cheeks, her great limpid, brown eyes, her soft dark hair parted madonna-like across her beautiful brow, her whole face was like some exquisite composite picture of all the saints of history. Her voice also was amazingly tranquil.
“Oh, fudge!” she drawled. “What’s eating you, Rae Malgregor? I won’t either get out. It’s my room just as much as it is yours. And Helene’s just as much as it is ours. And, besides,” she added more briskly, “it’s four o’clock now, and, with graduation at eight and the dance afterward, if we don’t get our stuff packed up now, when in thunder shall we get it done?” Quite irrelevantly she began to laugh. Her laugh was perceptibly shriller than her speaking-voice. “Say, Rae,” she confided, “that minister I nursed through pneumonia last winter wants me to pose as ‘Sanctity’ for a stained-glass window in his new church! Isn’t he the softy?”
“Shall you do it?” quizzed Rae Malgregor, a trifle tensely.
“Shall I do it?” mocked the new-comer. “Well, you just watch me! Four mornings a week in June at full week’s wages? Fresh Easter lilies every day? White silk angel-robes? All the high souls and high paints kowtowing around me? Why, it would be more fun than a box of monkeys. Sure I’ll do it.”
Expeditiously as she spoke, the new-comer reached up for the framed motto over her own ample mirror, and yanking it down with one single tug, began to busy herself adroitly with a snarl in the picture-cord. Like a withe of willow yearning over a brook, her slender figure curved to the task. Very scintillatingly the afternoon light seemed to brighten suddenly across her lap. “You’ll Be A Long Time Dead!” glinted the motto through its sun-dazzled glass.
Still panting with excitement, still bristling with resentment, Rae Malgregor stood surveying the intrusion and the intruder. A dozen impertinent speeches were rioting in her mind. Twice her mouth opened and shut before she finally achieved the particular opprobrium that completely satisfied her.
“Bah! you look like a—trained nurse!” she blurted forth at last with hysterical triumph.