Always her well-ordered brain came back to Bernie. There must be many Bernies. Could she find her niche helping them? How?
She tried drastic self-analysis. Then she relaxed and tried yielding herself unreservedly to instinct.
Finally she thought of Bernie in terms of immediate help—guiding her through her Gethsemane—concretely. The function of nursing was but a step to conceiving herself the physician—of body as well as mind.
The aptness of it struck her with peculiar force. A physician! Why not? Women were assailing all citadels of professions and business. Why not a physician? A great, warm, poignant self-assurance welled up within her. Why had she not thought of it before?
In the ensuing ten moments her life course lay clear as an etching before her. The film between herself and the future had suddenly been swept aside. She was radiantly, unreasoningly happy. She wanted to sing with the ecstasy of the revelation.
III
She did sing. Whereupon she was so happy too that she wept—a little bit. What had taken possession of her? For the first time she felt blindly content to relax to intuitions and emotions.
It was her last night in the dormitory room, where she had passed four beautiful years. Her roommate had already departed. Madelaine arose, her calm face suffused with a quiet glory. She turned on the lights.
On the dressing table the last of her effects lay for final packing in her bag on the morrow. Among them was a poem framed in a heavy copper border. It had hung above her study table the two years past. She had grown very intimate with that little news-print poem on its deep brown mapping.
Though she could repeat it perfectly, she read it again now, line by line and word by word: