"Having you in training and upon my staff, Mattie, has been one of the really great joys of a very trying life!"
Mattie began disintegrating, and Miss Kerr put her hand upon the knob of her niece's door and was inside before the supervisor could moisten her lips.
The room was inky, the dark blue window shade was pulled even with the sill. Miss Kerr whispered, involuntary, "Evelina!"
Two sobs inverted their explosion. The girl sat up beating the air. Miss Kerr ignored her agony and began relentlessly:
"This is no time for hysterics. Come on and tell me! What did you tell them...?"
"The General Staff." Each letter of each word came bitingly.
Miss Kerr threw out her chin, and enunciated carefully:
"No woman can talk to that many men about nothing for half an hour. You fail to realize Evelina that everything you have you owe to me. Your training, your education, your clothes, even the straightening of your teeth I paid for!"
The girl cringed in the blackness. Her voice was subservient:
"I ... I ... know it, Auntie. I swear ... to God ... I didn't tell them ... and I never will! I'd get thrown out of training ... before ... I'd...."
Miss Kerr's words sealed her lips. They beat into her brain:
"A private who accuses his general ... is always court-martialed!"
Then she turned upon her heel and closed the door after her.
For ten minutes the student nurse sobbed dryly. Complete exhaustion then smothered the sobs. She fell asleep.
In the nurses' cafeteria the first group were beginning to choose their lunches. The white uniforms of the graduate nurses and the blue uniforms of the student nurses with their white collars and cuffs reflected the glare from the thin curtains at the sunlit windows.
Near a table occupied by four student nurses sat Rose Standish, head nurse in the accident room. Her small ivory face was buried in a volume of "Sonnets from the Portuguese" and she guided the teaspoons of gelatine and whipped cream into her mouth by a sense of feeling, not sight. Her outer eye was transferring to her inner one the charm of a mind drenched in the world's great love.
The student nurse with a raucous Kansas whine was saying:
"I don't know. Why?" responded a flat Alabama drawl.
"I saw her in the corridor with two supervisors at ten o'clock and Minnie says they've got her locked in her room and won't let anybody talk to her. She ... she ... looked frightful."