caught a trifle. "If only--it didn't look so
disgustingly noble and--hygienic--and dollish!"

All along the back of her neck little sharp prickly pains began suddenly
to sting and burn.

"Silly--simpering--pink and white puppet!" she scolded squintingly,
"I'll teach you how to look like a real girl!"

Very threateningly she raised herself to her tiptoes and thrust her
glowing, corporeal face right up into the moulten, elusive,
quick-silver face in the mirror. Pink for pink, blue for blue, gold for
gold, dollish smirk for dollish smirk, the mirror mocked her seething
inner fretfulness.

"Why--darn you!" she gasped. "Why--darn you! Why, you looked more human
than that when you left the Annapolis Valley three years ago! There were
at least--tears in your face then, and--cinders, and--your mother's best
advice, and the worry about the mortgage, and--and--the blush of Joe
Hazeltine's kiss!"

Furtively with the tip of her index-finger she started to search her
imperturbable pink cheek for the spot where Joe Hazeltine's kiss had
formerly flamed.

"My hands are all right, anyway!" she acknowledged with infinite relief.
Triumphantly she raised both strong, stub-fingered, exaggeratedly
executive hands to the level of her childish blue eyes and stood
surveying the mirrored effect with ineffable satisfaction. "Why my hands
are--dandy!" she gloated. "Why they're perfectly--dandy! Why they're
wonderful! Why they're--." Then suddenly and fearfully she gave a
shrill little scream. "But they don't go with my silly doll-face!" she
cried. "Why, they don't! They don't! They go with the Senior Surgeon's
scowling Heidelberg eyes! They go with the Senior Surgeon's grim gray
jaw! They go with the--! Oh! what shall I do? What shall I do?"

Dizzily, with her stubby finger-tips prodded deep into every jaded
facial muscle that she could compass, she staggered towards the air, and
dropping down into the first friendly chair that bumped against her
knees, sat staring blankly out across the monotonous city roofs that
flanked her open window,--trying very, very hard for the first time in
her life, to consider the General-Phenomenon-of-Being-a-Trained-Nurse.

All around and about her, inexorable as anesthesia, horrid as the hush
of tomb or public library, lurked the painfully unmistakable sense of
institutional restraint. Mournfully to her ear from some remote kitcheny
region of pots and pans a browsing spoon tinkled forth from time to time