The White Linen Nurse

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CHAPTER I


The White Linen Nurse was so tired that her noble expression ached.

Incidentally her head ached and her shoulders ached and her lungs ached
and the ankle-bones of both feet ached quite excruciatingly. But nothing
of her felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression. Like
a strip of lip-colored lead suspended from her poor little nose by two
tugging wire-gray wrinkles her persistently conscientious sickroom smile
seemed to be whanging aimlessly against her front teeth. The sensation
certainly was very unpleasant.

Looking back thus on the three spine-curving, chest-cramping,
foot-twinging, ether-scented years of her hospital training, it dawned
on the White Linen Nurse very suddenly that nothing of her ever had
felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression!

Impulsively she sprang for the prim white mirror that capped her prim
white bureau and stood staring up into her own entrancing,
bright-colored Novia Scotian reflection with tense and unwonted
interest.

Except for the unmistakable smirk which fatigue had clawed into her
plastic young mouth-lines there was certainly nothing special the matter
with what she saw.

"Perfectly good face!" she attested judicially with no more than common
courtesy to her progenitors. "Perfectly good and tidy looking face! If
only--if only--" her breath caught a trifle. "If only--it didn't look so
disgustingly noble and--hygienic--and dollish!"