up at her calmly. "Not in the least," she answered. "I have
nursed hundreds of cases."

"Oh, my, how dreadful! And never caught it?"

"Never. I am not afraid, you see."

"I wish _I_ wasn't! Hundreds of cases! It makes one ill to think of
it!... And all successfully?"

"Almost all of them."

"You don't tell your patients stories when they're ill about your other
cases who died, do you?" Lady Meadowcroft went on, with a quick little
shudder.

Hilda's face by this time was genuinely sympathetic. "Oh, never!" she
answered, with truth. "That would be very bad nursing! One's object in
treating a case is to make one's patient well; so one naturally avoids
any sort of subject that might be distressing or alarming."

"You really mean it?" Her face was pleading.

"Why, of course. I try to make my patients my friends; I talk to them
cheerfully; I amuse them and distract them; I get them away, as far as I
can, from themselves and their symptoms."

"Oh, what a lovely person to have about one when one's ill!" the languid
lady exclaimed, ecstatically. "I SHOULD like to send for you if I wanted
nursing! But there--it's always so, of course, with a real lady; common
nurses frighten one so. I wish I could always have a lady to nurse me!"

"A person who sympathises--that is the really important thing," Hilda
answered, in her quiet voice. "One must find out first one's patient's
temperament. YOU are nervous, I can see." She laid one hand on her new
friend's arm. "You need to be kept amused and engaged when you are ill;
what YOU require most is--insight--and sympathy."

The little fist doubled up again; the vacant face grew positively sweet.
"That's just it! You have hit it! How clever you are! I want all that. I
suppose, Miss Wade, YOU never go out for private nursing?"

"Never," Hilda answered. "You see, Lady Meadowcroft, I don't nurse for a
livelihood. I have means of my own; I took up this work as an occupation
and a sphere in life. I haven't done anything yet but hospital nursing."

Lady Meadowcroft drew a slight sigh. "What a pity!" she murmured,
slowly. "It does seem hard that your sympathies should all be thrown
away, so to speak, on a horrid lot of wretched poor people, instead of
being spent on your own equals--who would so greatly appreciate them."

"I think I can venture to say the poor appreciate them, too," Hilda
answered, bridling up a little--for there was nothing she hated so much
as class-prejudices. "Besi