At five o’clock that morning she was still sitting on a stool beside a glass table, polishing instruments which made her shiver.  All around were things that were spattered with blood.  But she looked anything but fluttery.  She was a very grim and determined young person just then, and professional beyond belief.  The other things, like washing window-sills and cutting toe-nails, had had no significance.  But here she was at last on the edge of mercy.  Some one who might have died had lived that night because of this room, and these instruments, and willing hands.

She hoped she would always have willing hands.

She looked very pale at breakfast the next morning, and rather older.  Also she had a new note of authority in her voice when she telephoned the kitchen and demanded H ward’s soft-boiled eggs.  She washed window-sills that morning again, but no longer was there rebellion in her soul.  She was seeing suddenly how the hospital required all these menial services, which were not menial at all but only preparation; that there were little tasks and big ones, and one graduated from the one to the other.

She took some flowers from the ward bouquet and put them beside Johnny’s bed—­Johnny, who was still lying quiet, with closed eyes.

The Senior Surgical Interne did a dressing in the ward that morning.  He had been in to see Augustus Baird, and he felt uneasy.  He vented it on Tony, the Italian, with a stiletto thrust in his neck, by jerking at the adhesive.  Tony wailed, and Jane Brown, who was the “dirty” nurse—­which does not mean what it appears to mean, but is the person who receives the soiled dressings—­Jane Brown gritted her teeth.

“Keep quiet,” said the S.S.I., who was a good fellow, but had never been stabbed in the neck for running away with somebody else’s wife.

“Eet hurt,” said Tony.  “Ow.”

Jane Brown turned very pink.

“Why don’t you let me cut it off properly?” she said, in a strangled tone.

The total result of this was that Jane Brown was reprimanded by the First Assistant, and learned some things about ethics.

“But,” she protested, “it was both stupid and cruel.  And if I know I am right——­”

“How are you to know you are right?” demanded the First Assistant, crossly.  Her feet were stinging. “’A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’” This was a favorite quotation of hers, although not Browning.  “Nurses in hospitals are there to carry out the doctor’s orders.  Not to think or to say what they think unless they are asked.  To be intelligent, but——­”

“But not too intelligent!” said the Probationer.  “I see.”

This was duly reported to the Head, who observed that it was merely what she had expected and extremely pert.  Her cold was hardly any better.

It was taking the Probationer quite a time to realise her own total lack of significance in all this.  She had been accustomed to men who rose when a woman entered a room and remained standing as long as she stood.  And now she was in a new world, where she had to rise and remain standing while a cocky youth in ducks, just out of medical college, sauntered in with his hands in his pockets and took a boutonniere from the ward bouquet.