proportions of a giraffe, the Superintendent of Nurses reared up
from her stoop-shouldered desk-work and stared forth in speechless
astonishment across the top of her spectacles.

Exuberantly impertinent, ecstatically self-conscious, Rae Malgregor
repeated her demand. To her parched mouth the very taste of her own
babbling impudence refreshed her like the shock and prickle of cracked
ice.

"I tell you I want my own face again! And my own hands!" she reiterated
glibly. "I mean the face with the mortgage in it, and the cinders--and
the other human expressions!" she explained. "And the nice grubby
country hands that go with that sort of a face!"

Very accusingly she raised her finger and shook it at the
Superintendent's perfectly livid countenance.

"Oh, of course I know I wasn't very much to look at. But at least I
matched! What my hands knew, I mean, my face knew! Pies or plowing or
May-baskets, what my hands knew my face knew! That's the way hands and
faces ought to work together! But you? you with all your rules and your
bossing and your everlasting 'S--sh! S--sh!' you've snubbed all the
know-anything out of my face--and made my hands nothing but two
disconnected machines--for somebody else to run! And I hate you! You're
a Monster! You're a ----, everybody hates you!"

Mutely then she shut her eyes, bowed her head, and waited for the
Superintendent to smite her dead. The smite she felt quite sure would be
a noisy one. First of all, she reasoned it would fracture her skull.
Naturally then of course it would splinter her spine. Later in all