“So do you,” said the new-corner, amiably.
With a little gasp of dismay, Rae Malgregor sprang suddenly forward. Her eyes were flooded with tears.
“Why, that’s just exactly what’s the matter with me!” she cried. “My face is all worn out trying to look like a trained nurse! O Zillah, how do you know you were meant to be a trained nurse? How does anybody know? O Zillah! save me! Save me!”
Languorously Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work and laughed. Her laugh was like the accidental tinkle of sleigh-bells in midsummer, vaguely disquieting, a shiver of frost across the face of a lily.
“Save you from what, you great big overgrown, tow-headed doll-baby?” she questioned blandly. “For Heaven’s sake, the only thing you need is to go back to whatever toy-shop you came from and get a new head. What in creation’s the matter with you lately, anyway Oh, of course you’ve had rotten luck this past month but what of it? That’s the trouble with you country girls. You haven’t got any stamina.”
With slow, shuffling-footed astonishment Rae Malgregor stepped out into the center of the room. “Country girls!” she repeated blankly. “Why, you’re a country girl yourself.”
“I am not,” snapped Zillah Forsyth. “I’ll have you understand that there are nine thousand people in the town I come from, and not a rube among them. Why, I tended soda-fountain in the swellest drug store there a whole year before I even thought of taking up nursing. And I wasn’t as green when I was six months old as you are now.”
Slowly, with a soft-snuggling sigh of contentment, she raised her slim white fingers to coax her dusky hair a little looser, a little farther down, a little more madonna-like across her sweet, mild forehead, then, snatching out abruptly at a convenient shirt-waist, began with extraordinary skill to apply its dangly lace sleeves as a protective bandage for the delicate glass-faced motto still in her lap, placed the completed parcel with inordinate scientific precision in the exact corner of her packing-box, and then went on very diligently, very zealously, to strip the men’s photographs from the mirror on her bureau. There were twenty-seven photographs in all, and for each one she had there already cut and prepared a small square of perfectly fresh, perfectly immaculate, white tissue wrapping-paper. No one so transcendently fastidious, so exquisitely neat in all her personal habits, had ever before been trained in that particular hospital.
Very soberly the doll-faced girl stood watching the men’s pleasant paper countenances smoothed away one by one into their chaste white veilings, until at last, quite without warning, she poked an accusing, inquisitive finger directly across Zillah Forsyth’s shoulder.
“Zillah,” she demanded peremptorily, “all the year I’ve wanted to know, all the year every other girl in our class has wanted to know—where did you ever get that picture of the Senior Surgeon? He never gave it to you in the world. He didn’t, he didn’t! He’s not that kind.”