She was provided with a jug of warm water, several thermometers, and a row of various women, ranging from the spinster of past sixty to the red-cheeked sixteen-year old daughter of the local vet--who ought to have known how to take a temperature, if it was only a dog’s! There were also two fluttering beribboned summer visitors from the neighbouring hotel; these were doing the simple life, with long motor veils and short skirts and a general condescending enthusiasm towards our wild moorland scenery, which they were fond of qualifying as “too sweet!”
“Perhaps,” said the secretary to the Signorina as she hurried away, “you could teach them to take a pulse also. They can practise on each other. It would be _such_ a help.”
The Signorina felt a little shy. It did seem somewhat presuming for anything so young as she was to be instructing people who were all, with the exception of the vet’s daughter, considerably older, and, therefore, obviously considerably richer in experience than herself. It added to her embarrassment that the summer visitors should fix two pairs of rapt eyes upon her with the expression of devotees listening to their favourite preacher.
However, she summoned her wits and her courage, and gave a brief exposition of the mysteries of thermometer and pulse, patiently repeating herself, while the students took copious notes. Certainly there was something touching in this humble ardour for useful knowledge. Then the thrilling moment of practice began.
The spinster first monopolized the instructress’s attention. Her white hairs and her years entitled her to precedence.
“Of course,” she remarked, with the air of one whose scientific education has not been altogether neglected, as she balanced her thermometer over the jug, “the water won’t really make it go up, will it, no matter how hot it is?”
The Signorina did not think she could have understood.
“I mean,” said the maiden lady, waving the little tube, “it’s not heat that will ever make the thermometer go up. It’s fever, isn’t it?”
“But fever is heat,” mildly asserted the “home-nurse.”
“Oh no, I don’t mean _that_” said the spinster loftily. “Of course, I know you’re hot with fever; but it’s something _in_ you, isn’t it, that affects the thermometer? It wouldn’t go up, even if I put it on the stove, would it?”