supercilious smile, and her voice edged suddenly like a twisted sword.
"Well, the uniforms _are_ cute!" she parried. "They are! They are! I bet
you there's more than one girl standing high in the graduating class
to-day who never would have stuck out her first year's bossin' and slops
and worry and death--if she'd had to stick it out in the unimportant
looking clothes she came from home in! Even you, Helene Churchill, with
all your pious talk,--the day they put your coachman's son in as new
Interne and you got called down from the office for failing to stand
when Mr. Young Coachman came into the room, you bawled all night,--you
did,--and swore you'd chuck your whole job and go home the next day--if
it wasn't that you'd just had a life-size photo taken in full nursing
costume to send to your brother's chum at Yale! So there!"

With a gasp of ineffable satisfaction she turned from Helene Churchill.

"Sure the uniforms are cute!" she slashed back at Zillah
Forsyth. "That's the whole trouble with 'em. They're so
awfully--masqueradishly--cute! Sure, I could have got engaged to the
Typhoid Boy. It would have been as easy as robbing a babe! But lots of
girls, I notice, get engaged in their uniforms, feeding a patient
perfectly scientifically out of his own silver spoon, who don't seem
to stay engaged so especially long in their own street clothes, bungling
just plain naturally with their own knives and forks! Even you, Zillah
Forsyth," she hacked, "even you who trot round like the Lord's Anointed
in your pure white togs, you're just as Dutchy looking as anybody else,
come to put you in a red hat and a tan coat and a blue skirt!"

Mechanically she raised her hands to her head as though with some silly
thought of keeping the horrid pain in her temples from slipping to her
throat, her breast, her feet.