bleness. We are all human, even if we are all gentlemen; and while
silly young things----"
But John Storm was out in the hall and putting on his hat to see Glory.
Glory had not yet awakened from her trance. While others were living in
to-day she was still going about in yesterday. The emotion of the theatre
was upon her, and the world of reality took the tone and colour of drama.
This made her a tender woman, but a bad nurse.
She began the day in the Outpatient Department, and a poor woman came
with a child that had bitten its tongue. Its condition required that it
should remain in the house a day or two. "Let me put the pore thing to
bed; she's allus used to me," said the woman piteously. "Are you the
mother?" said the Sister. "No, the grandmother." "The mother is the only
person who can enter the wards except on visiting day." The poor woman
began to cry. Glory had to carry the child to bed, and she whispered to
the grandmother, "Come this way," and the woman followed her. When they
came to the surgical ward, she said to the nurse in charge, "This is the
child's mother, and she has come to put the poor little thing to bed."
Later in the morning she was sent up to help in the same ward. A patient
in great pain called to her and said, "Loosen this bandage for me, nurse;
it is killing me!" And she loosened it.
But the glamour of the theatre was upon her as well as its sentiment and
emotion, and in the space before the bed of one of the patients, at a
moment when the ward Sister was away, she began to make imitations of
Beatrice and Benedick and the singer of "Sigh no more, ladies." The
patient was Koenig, the choirmaster of "All Saints'," a little fat German
with long mustaches, which he waxed and curled as he lay in bed. Glory
had christened him "the hippopotamus," and at her mimicry he laughed so
much that he rolled and pitched and dived among the bedclothes.
"Ach, Gott!" he cried, "vot a girl! Never--I haf never heard any one so
goot on de stage. Vot a voice, too! A leetle vork under a goot teacher,
and den, mein Gott! Vot is it de musicians say?--the genius has a Cremona
inside of him on which he first composes his immortal vorks. You haf the
Cremona, my dear, and I will help you to bring it out. Vot you tink?"
It was the hour of the morning when the patients who can afford it have
their newspapers brought up to them, but the newspapers were thrown
aside; every eye was on Glory, and there was much noisy l
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