"For Heaven's sake, Rae, shut up!" she said. "What in Creation's the matter with you to-day? I never saw you act so before!" With real concern she stared into the girl's turbid eyes. "If you feel like that about it, what in thunder did you go into nursing for?" she demanded not unkindly.
Very slowly Helene Churchill rose from her lowly seat by her precious book-case and came round and looked at Rae Malgregor rather oddly. "Yes," faltered Helene Churchill. "What did you go into nursing for?" The faintest possible taint of asperity was in her voice.
Quite dumbly for an instant Rae Malgregor's natural timidity stood battling the almost fanatic professional fervor in Helene Churchill's frankly open face, the raw, scientific passion, of very different caliber, but no less intensity, hidden so craftily behind Zillah Forsyth's plastic features. Then suddenly her own hands went clutching back at the bureau for support, and all the flaming, raging red went ebbing out of her cheeks, leaving her lips with hardly blood enough left to work them.
"I went into nursing," she mumbled, "and it's God's own truth,-I went into nursing because-because I thought the uniforms were so cute."
Furiously, the instant the words were gone from her mouth, she turned and snarled at Zillah's hooting laughter.
"Well, I had to do something!" she attested. The defense was like a flat blade slapping the air.
Desperately she turned to Helene Churchill's goading, faintly supercilious smile, and her voice edged suddenly like a twisted sword. "Well, the uniforms are cute!" she parried. "They are! They are! I bet you there's more than one girl standing high in the graduating class to-day who never would have stuck out her first year's bossin' and slops and worry and death-if she'd had to stick it out in the unimportant looking clothes she came from home in! Even you, Helene Churchill, with all your pious talk,-the day they put your coachman's son in as new Interne and you got called down from the office for failing to stand when Mr. Young Coachman came into the room, you bawled all night,-you did,-and swore you'd chuck your whole job and go home the next day-if it wasn't that you'd just had a life-size photo taken in full nursing costume to send to your brother's chum at Yale! So there!"
With a gasp of ineffable satisfaction she turned from Helene Churchill.
"Sure the uniforms are cute!" she slashed back at Zillah Forsyth. "That's the whole trouble with 'em. They're so awfully-masqueradishly-cute! Sure, I could have got engaged to the Typhoid Boy. It would have been as easy as robbing a babe! But lots of girls, I notice, get engaged in their uniforms, feeding a patient perfectly scientifically out of his own silver spoon, who don't seem to stay engaged so especially long in their own street clothes, bungling just plain naturally with their own knives and forks! Even you, Zillah Forsyth," she hacked, "even you who trot round like the Lord's Anointed in your pure white togs, you're just as Dutchy looking as anybody else, come to put you in a red hat and a tan coat and a blue skirt!"
Mechanically she raised her hands to her head as though with some silly thought of keeping the horrid pain in her temples from slipping to her throat, her breast, her feet.
"Sure the uniforms are cute," she persisted a bit thickly. "Sure the Typhoid Boy was crazy about me! He called me his 'Holy Chorus Girl,' I heard him-raving in his sleep. Lord save us! What are we to any man but just that?" she questioned hotly with renewed venom. "Parson, actor, young sinner, old saint-I ask you frankly, girls, on your word of honor, was there ever more than one man in ten went through your hands who didn't turn out soft somewhere before you were through with him? Mawking about your 'sweet eyes' while you're wrecking your optic nerves trying to decipher the dose on a poison bottle! Mooning over your wonderful likeness to the lovely young sister they-never had! Trying to kiss your finger tips when you're struggling to brush their teeth! Teasin' you to smoke cigarettes with 'em-when they know it would cost you your job!"
Impishly, without any warning, she crooked her knee and pointed at one homely square-toed shoe in a mincy dancing step. Hoydenishly she threw out her arms and tried to gather Helene and Zillah both into their compass.
"Oh, you Holy Chorus Girls!" she chuckled with maniacal delight. "Everybody, all together, now! Kick your little kicks! Smile your little smiles! Tinkle your little thermometers! Steady,-there! One-two-three-One-two-three!"
Laughingly Zillah Forsyth slipped from the grasp. "Don't you dare 'holy' me!" she threatened.
In real irritation Helene released herself. "I'm no chorus girl," she said coldly.
With a little shrill scream of pain Rae Malgregor's hands went flying back to her temples. Like a person giving orders in a great panic she turned authoritatively to her two room-mates, her fingers all the while boring frenziedly into her temples.
"Now, girls," she warned, "stand well back! If my head bursts, you know, it's going to burst all to slivers and splinters-like a boiler!"
"Rae, you're crazy!" hooted Zillah.
"Just plain vulgar-looney," faltered Helene.
Both girls reached out simultaneously to push her aside.
Somewhere in the dusty, indifferent street a bird's note rang out in one wild, delirious ecstasy of untrammeled springtime. To all intents and purposes the sound might have been the one final signal that Rae Malgregor's jangled nerves were waiting for.
"Oh, I am crazy, am I?" she cried with a new, fierce joy. "Oh, I am crazy, am I? Well, I'll go ask the Superintendent and see if I am! Oh, surely they wouldn't try and make me graduate if I really was crazy!"
Madly she bolted for her bureau, and snatching her own motto down, crumpled its face securely against her skirt and started for the door. Just what the motto was no one but herself knew. Sprawling in paint-brush hieroglyphics on a great flapping sheet of brown wrapping-paper, the sentiment, whatever it was, had been nailed face down to the wall for three tantalizing years.
"No you don't!" cried Zillah now, as she saw the mystery threatening so meanly to escape her.
"No you don't!" cried Helene. "You've seen our mottoes-and now we're going to see yours!"
Almost crazed with new terror Rae Malgregor went dodging to the right,-to the left,-to the right again,-cleared the rocking-chair,-a scuffle with padded hands,-climbed the trunk,-a race with padded feet,-reached the door-handle at last, yanked the door open, and with lungs and temper fairly bursting with momentum, shot down the hall,-down some stairs,-down some more hall,-down some more stairs, to the Superintendent's office where, with her precious motto still clutched securely in one hand, she broke upon that dignitary's startled, near-sighted vision like a young whirl-wind of linen and starch and flapping brown paper. Breathlessly, without prelude or preamble, she hurled her grievance into the older woman's grievance-dulled ears.
"Give me back my own face!" she demanded peremptorily. "Give me back my own face, I say! And my own hands! I tell you I want my own hands! Helene and Zillah say I'm insane! And I want to go home!"
CHAPTER III
Like a short-necked animal elongated suddenly to the cervical proportions of a giraffe, the Superintendent of Nurses reared up from her stoop-shouldered desk-work and stared forth in speechless astonishment across the top of her spectacles.
Exuberantly impertinent, ecstatically self-conscious, Rae Malgregor repeated her demand. To her parched mouth the very taste of her own babbling impudence refreshed her like the shock and prickle of cracked ice.
"I tell you I want my own face again! And my own hands!" she reiterated glibly. "I mean the face with the mortgage in it, and the cinders-and the other human expressions!" she explained. "And the nice grubby country hands that go with that sort of a face!"