" At these periods the hospitals are
flooded with applications from young girls whom the vernal equinox urges
first to be mothers, and, failing motherhood, nurses. Just before she
met Henry, Angel had done her best to miss him by frantic endeavours to
nurse people whom the hospital doctors decided she was far too slight a
thing to lift,--for unless you can lift your patients, not to say throw
them about, you fail in the muscular qualifications of a hospital nurse.
Dot, as we have seen, was impelled in this direction from no merely
sentimental impulse, unless the religious impulse, which paradoxically
makes nuns of disappointed mothers, may so be called. Perhaps,
unacknowledged, deep down in her heart, she longed to be the nurse--of
one little wonderful child. Had this been granted her, it is probable
that the maimed and the halt would have had less attraction for her
pitying imagination. As it was, however, she persuaded herself that she
loved them. Was it because, at the moment, no one else seemed to
need her love?
CHAPTER XXXVII
STAGE WAITS, MR.
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