blasé farmer-lad will not even lift his eyes from the plow to watch the
pinkness of her passing. But here in the prudish brick-minded city where
the Young Spring at her friskiest is nothing more audacious than a
sweltering, winter-swathed madcap, who has impishly essayed some fine
morning to tiptoe down street in her soft, sloozily, green,
silk-stockinged feet, the whole hob-nailed population reels back aghast
and agrin before the most innocent flash of the rogue's green-veiled
toes. And then, suddenly snatching off its own cumbersome winter
foot-habits, goes chasing madly after her, in its own prankish,
vari-colored socks.

Now the White Linen Nurse's socks were black, and cotton at that, a
combination incontestably sedate. And the White Linen Nurse had waded
barefoot through too many posied country pastures to experience any
ordinary city thrill over the sight of a single blade of grass pushing
scarily through a crack in the pavement, or puny, concrete-strangled
maple tree flushing wanly to the smoky sky. Indeed for three hustling,
square-toed, rubber-heeled city years the White Linen Nurse had never
even stopped to notice whether the season was flavored with frost or
thunder. But now, unexplainably, just at the end of it all, sitting
innocently there at her own prim little bed-room window, staring
innocently out across indomitable roof-tops,--with the crackle of glory
and diplomas already ringing in her ears,--she heard, instead, for the
first time in her life, the gaily dare-devil voice of the spring, a
hoydenish challenge flung back at her, leaf-green, from the crest of a
winter-scarred hill.

"Hello, White Linen Nurse!" screamed the saucy city spring. "Hello,
White Linen Nurse! Take off your homely starched collar! Or your silly
candy-box cap! Or any other thing that feels maddeningly artificial! And