“Why, Zillah!” gasped the country girl.  “Why, I think you ’re perfectly awful!  Why, Zillah Forsyth!  Don’t you ever say a thing like that again!  You can joke all you want to about the flirty young Internes.  They’re nothing but fellows.  But it isn’t—­it isn’t respectful—­for you to talk like that about the Senior Surgeon.  He’s too—­too terrifying!” she finished in an utter panic of consternation.

“Oh, now I know it was the Senior Surgeon that made you jilt your country beau!” taunted Zillah Forsyth with soft alto sarcasm.

“I didn’t, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine!” stormed Rae Malgregor explosively.  Backed up against her bureau, eyes flaming, breast heaving, little candy-box cap all tossed askew over her left ear, she stood defying her tormentor.  “I didn’t, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine!” she reasserted passionately.  “It was Joe Hazeltine that jilted me!  And we ’d been going together since we were kids!  And now he’s married the dominie’s daughter and they’ve got a kid of their own most as old as he and I were when we first began courting each other.  And it’s all because I insisted on being a trained nurse,” she finished shrilly.

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.  “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?”