“Damn having a chauffeur who gets drunk the one day of the year when you need him most!” he muttered under his breath, as with the same exquisitely sensitive fingers that could have dissected like a caress the nervous system of a humming bird, or re-set unbruisingly the broken wing of a butterfly, he hurled his hundred and eighty pounds of infuriate brute-strength against the calm, chronic, mechanical stubbornness of that auto crank.  “Damn!” he swore on the upward pull.  “Damn!” he gasped on the downward push.  “Damn!” he cursed and sputtered and spluttered.  Purple with effort, bulging-eyed with strain, reeking with sweat, his frenzied outburst would have terrorized the entire hospital staff.

With an odd little twinge of homesickness, the White Linen Nurse slid cautiously out to the edge of her seat so that she might watch the struggle better.  For thus, with dripping foreheads and knotted neck-muscles and breaking backs and rankly tempestuous language, did the untutored men-folk of her own beloved home-land hurl their great strength against bulls and boulders and refractory forest trees.  Very startlingly as she watched, a brand new thought went zig-zagging through her consciousness.  Was it possible,—­was it even so much as remotely possible—­that the great Senior Surgeon,—­the great, wonderful, altogether formidable, altogether unapproachable Senior Surgeon,—­was just a—­was just a—?  Stripped ruthlessly of all his social superiority,—­of all his professional halo,—­of all his scientific achievement, the Senior Surgeon stood suddenly forth before her—­a mere man—­just like other men! Just exactly like other men?  Like the sick drug-clerk?  Like the new-born millionaire baby?  Like the doddering old Dutch gaffer?  The very delicacy of such a thought drove the blood panic-stricken from her face.  It was the indelicacy of the thought that brought the blood surging back again to brow, to cheeks, to lips, even to the tips of her ears.

Glancing up casually from the roar and rumble of his abruptly repentant engine the Senior Surgeon swore once more under his breath to think that any female sitting perfectly idle and non-concerned in a seven thousand dollar car should have the nerve to flaunt such a furiously strenuous color.

Bristling with resentment and mink furs he strode around the fender and stumbled with increasing irritation across the White Linen Nurse’s knees to his seat.  Just for an instant his famous fingers seemed to flash with apparent inconsequence towards one bit of mechanism and another.  Then like a huge, portentous pill floated on smoothest syrup the car slid down the yawning street into the congested city.

Altogether monotonously in terms of pain and dirt and drug and disease the city wafted itself in and out of the White Linen Nurse’s well-grooved consciousness.  From every filthy street corner sodden age or starved babyhood reached out its fluttering pulse to her.  Then, suddenly sweet as a draught through a fever-tainted room, the squalid city freshened into jocund, luxuriant suburbs with rollicking tennis courts, and flaming yellow forsythia blossoms, and green velvet lawns prematurely posied with pale exotic hyacinths and great scarlet splotches of lusty tulips.