"I was perfectly willing. Just one single solitary year of hospital
training had made me perfectly willing. And you can't _un_-willing a
willing--even to please your beau, no matter how hard you try!" With a
droll admixture of shyness and disdain she tossed her curly blonde head
a trifle higher. "Shucks!" she attested. "What's a traveling salesman's
thigh?"

"Shucks yourself!" scoffed Zillah Forsyth. "What's a silly beau or two
up in Nova Scotia to a girl with looks like you? You could have married
that typhoid case a dozen times last winter if you'd crooked your little
finger! Why, the fellow was crazy about you. And he was richer than
Croesus. What queered it?" she demanded bluntly. "Did his mother hate
you?"

Like one fairly cramped with astonishment Rae Malgregor doubled up very
suddenly at the waist-line, and thrusting her neck oddly forward after
the manner of a startled crane, stood peering sharply round the corner
of the rocking-chair at Zillah Forsyth.

"Did his mother hate me?" she gasped. "Did--his--mother--hate--me? Well,
what do you think? With me who never even saw plumbing till I came down
here, setting out to explain to her with twenty tiled bathrooms how to
be hygienic though rich? Did his mother hate me? Well, what do you
think? With her who bore him, her who _bore_ him, mind you, kept
waiting down stairs in the hospital ante-room--half an hour every
day--on the raw edge of a rattan chair--waiting--worrying--all old and
gray and scared--while little young, perky, pink and white _me_ is
upstairs--brushing her own son's hair and washing her own son's
face--and altogether getting her own son ready to see his own mother!
And then me obliged to turn her out again in ten minutes, flip as you