With an expression of real shock Helene Churchill peered up from her
lowly seat on the floor.

"You mean?" she asked a bit breathlessly. "You mean that he didn't want
you to be a trained nurse? You mean that he wasn't big enough,--wasn't
fine enough to appreciate the nobility of the profession?"

"Nobility nothing!" snapped Rae Malgregor. "It was me scrubbing strange
men with alcohol that he couldn't stand for! And I don't know as I
exactly blame him," she added huskily. "It certainly is a good deal of a
liberty when you stop to think about it."

Quite incongruously her big, childish, blue eyes narrowed suddenly into
two dark, calculating slits. "It's comic," she mused, "how there isn't a
man in the world who would stand letting his wife or daughter or sister
have a male nurse. But look at the jobs we girls get sent out on! It's
very confusing!"

With sincere appeal she turned to Zillah Forsyth. "And yet--and yet,"
she stammered. "And yet--when everything scary that's in you has once
been scared out of you,--why, there's nothing left in you to be scared
_with_ any more, is there?"

"What? What?" pleaded Helene Churchill. "Say it again! What?"

"That's what Joe and I quarreled about my first vacation home!"
persisted Rae Malgregor. "It was a traveling salesman's thigh. It was
broken bad. Somebody had to take care of it. So I did! Joe thought it
wasn't modest to be so willing." With a perplexed sort of defiance she
raised her square little chin. "But you see I was willing!" she said.