"How do I know anything? How does anybody know anything?"

Like a smoldering fuse the rambling query crept back into the inner
recesses of her brain and fired once more the one great question that
lay dormant there. Impetuously she ran forward and stared into Helene
Churchill's face. "How do you know you were meant to be a Trained Nurse,
Helene Churchill?" she began all over again. "How does anybody know she
was really meant to be one? How can anybody, I mean, be perfectly sure?"
Like a drowning man clutching out at the proverbial straw, she clutched
at the parchment in Helene Churchill's hand. "I mean--where did you get
your motto, Helene Churchill?" she persisted with increasing
irritability. "If--you don't tell me--I'll tear the whole thing to
pieces!"

With a startled frown Helene Churchill jerked back out of reach. "What's
the matter with you, Rae?" she quizzed sharply, and then turning round
quite casually to her book-case began to draw from the shelves one by one
her beloved Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth, Robert Browning. "Oh, I did so
want to go to China," she confided irrelevantly. "But my family have
just written me that they won't stand for it. So I suppose I'll have to
go into tenement work here in the city instead." With a visible effort
she jerked her mind back again to the feverish question in Rae
Malgregor's eyes. "Oh, you want to know where I got my motto?" she
asked. A flash of intuition brightened suddenly across her
absent-mindedness. "Oh!" she smiled, "you mean you want to know--just
what the incident was that first made me decide to--devote my life
to--to humanity?"

"Yes!" snapped Rae Malgregor.