White Linen Nurse

“ Stumbling out into the shadowy hall to greet the new day and the new beginning, the Senior Surgeon almost tripped and fell over the White Linen Nurse sitting all huddled up and drowsy-eyed in a little gray heap on his outer threshold. The sensation of stepping upon a human body is not a pleasant one. It smote the Senior Surgeon nauseously through the nerves of his stomach.
"What are you doing here?" he fairly screamed at her.
"Just keeping you company, sir," yawned the White Linen Nurse. Before her hand could reach her mouth again another great childish yawn overwhelmed her. ”

“ The Senior Surgeon would hardly have been human if he hadn't glanced back suddenly over his shoulder at the White Linen Nurse's precipitously changing color. Quite irrepressibly, as he saw the red, red blood come surging home again into her cheeks, a little short chuckling laugh escaped him. ”

“ Feeling hopelessly crushed under two tons and a half of car, the Senior Surgeon closed his eyes for death. No man of his weight, he felt quite sure, could reasonably expect to survive many minutes longer the apoplectic, blood-red rage that pounded in his ear-drums. Through his tight-closed eyelids very, very slowly a red glow seemed to permeate. He thought it was the fires of Hell. Opening his eyes to meet his fate like a man he found himself staring impudently close instead into the White Linen Nurse's furiously flushed face that lay cuddled on one plump cheek staring impudently close at him. ”

“ Gray with road-travel, haggard with strain and fatigue, it was long, long after the rosy sunset time,—long, long after the yellow supper light, that he came dragging up through the sweet-scented dusk of the garden and threw himself down without greeting of any sort on the top step of the piazza where the White Linen Nurse's skirts glowed palely through the gloom. ”

“ If the grin round his mouth strengthened a trifle, so did the anxiety in his eyes.
"For Heaven's sake, Miss Malgregor," he pleaded. "Here's a man and a house and a child all going to—rack and ruin! If you're really and truly tired of nursing—and are looking for a new job,—what's the matter with tackling us?"
"It would be a job!" admitted the White Linen Nurse demurely.
"Why, it would be a deuce-of-a-job!" confided the Senior Surgeon with no demureness whatsoever. ”

“ Altogether monotonously in terms of pain and dirt and drug and disease the city wafted itself in and out of the White Linen Nurse's well-grooved consciousness. From every filthy street corner sodden age or starved babyhood reached out its fluttering pulse to her. Then, suddenly sweet as a draught through a fever-tainted room, the squalid city freshened into jocund, luxuriant suburbs with rollicking tennis courts, and flaming yellow forsythia blossoms, and green velvet lawns prematurely posied with pale exotic hyacinths and great scarlet splotches of lusty tulips. ”

“ If you decide to come to us, I—I couldn't, you know, at forty-eight—begin all over again to—to have some one waiting for me on the top step the first of July to tell me—what a low beast I am—till I go down the steps again—the following June."
"No, of course not," conceded the White Linen Nurse. Blandly she lifted her lovely eyes to his. "Father's like that!" she confided amiably. "Once a year,—just Easter Sunday only,—he always buys him a brand new suit of clothes and goes to church. ”

“ Beyond her dreariest ken of muffled voices, beyond her dingiest vista of slate and brick, on a far faint hillside, a far faint streak of April green went roaming jocundly skyward. Altogether sluggishly, as though her nostrils were plugged with warm velvet, the smell of spring and ether and scorched mutton-chops filtered in and out, in and out, in and out, of her abnormally jaded senses.
Taken all in all it was not a propitious afternoon for any girl as tired and as pretty as the White Linen Nurse to be considering the general phenomenon of anything—except April! ”

“ With real passion her slender fingers went clutching again at her harsh linen collar. "It isn't you, Helene Churchill," she taunted, "that's ever been to the Superintendent on your bended knees and begged for the rabies cases—and the small-pox! Gee! You like nursing because you think it's pious to like it! But I like it—because I like it!" From brow to chin as though fairly stricken with sincerity her whole bland face furrowed startlingly with crude expressiveness. "The smell of ether!" ”

“ ON the day of her graduation from the training-school, the White Linen Nurse was overcome by hysteria. For weeks she had been working too hard, and two or three cases with which she had been connected having gone wrong, she had racked herself with an absurd sense of responsibility. ”

“ Quite incongruously her big, childish, blue eyes narrowed suddenly into two dark, calculating slits. "It's comic," she mused, "how there isn't a man in the world who would stand letting his wife or daughter or sister have a male nurse. But look at the jobs we girls get sent out on! ”