everybody of course began to laugh, to scream, I mean, and shout with
amusement. And I, of course, began to cry. And the old drunken man
straightened up very oddly for an instant, with his battered hat in one
hand and the pot of pansies in the other,--and he raised the pot of
pansies very high, as though it had been a glass of rarest wine--and
bowed to me as--reverently as though he had been toasting me at my
father's table at some very grand dinner. And 'Inasmuch!' he said. Just
that,--'Inasmuch!' So that's how I happened to go into nursing!" she
finished as abruptly as she had begun. Like some wonderful
phosphorescent manifestation her whole shining soul seemed to flare
forth suddenly through her plain face.

With honest perplexity Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work.

"So that's--how you happened to go into nursing?" she quizzed
impatiently. Her long, straight nose was all puckered tight with
interrogation. Her dove-like eyes were fairly dilated with slow-dawning
astonishment. "You--don't--mean?" she gasped. "You don't mean that--just
for that--?" Incredulously she jumped to her feet and stood staring
blankly into the city girl's strangely illuminated features.

"Well, if I were a swell--like you!" she scoffed, "it would take a heap
sight more than a drunken man munching pansies and rum and Bible-texts
to--to jolt me out of my limousines and steam yachts and Adirondack
bungalows!"

Quite against all intention Helene Churchill laughed. She did not often
laugh. Just for an instant her eyes and Zillah Forsyth's clashed
together in the irremediable antagonism of caste,--the Plebeian's
scornful impatience with the Aristocrat, equaled only by the