During the evenings of my convalescence she would talk to me of her nursing experiences.  I have sometimes thought I would put down in writing the stories that she told me, but they would be sad reading.  The majority of them, I fear, would show only the tangled, seamy side of human nature, and God knows there is little need for us to point that out to each other, though so many nowadays seem to think it the only work worth doing.  A few of them were sweet, but I think they were the saddest; and over one or two a man might laugh, but it would not be a pleasant laugh.

“I never enter the door of a house to which I have been summoned,” she said to me one evening, “without wondering, as I step over the threshold, what the story is going to be.  I always feel inside a sick-room as if I were behind the scenes of life.  The people come and go about you, and you listen to them talking and laughing, and you look into your patient’s eyes, and you just know that it’s all a play.”

The incident that Jephson’s remark had reminded me of, she told me one afternoon, as I sat propped up by the fire, trying to drink a glass of port wine, and feeling somewhat depressed at discovering I did not like it.

“One of my first cases,” she said, “was a surgical operation.  I was very young at the time, and I made rather an awkward mistake—­I don’t mean a professional mistake—­but a mistake nevertheless that I ought to have had more sense than to make.

“My patient was a good-looking, pleasant-spoken gentleman.  The wife was a pretty, dark little woman, but I never liked her from the first; she was one of those perfectly proper, frigid women, who always give me the idea that they were born in a church, and have never got over the chill.  However, she seemed very fond of him, and he of her; and they talked very prettily to each other—­too prettily for it to be quite genuine, I should have said, if I’d known as much of the world then as I do now.

“The operation was a difficult and dangerous one.  When I came on duty in the evening I found him, as I expected, highly delirious.  I kept him as quiet as I could, but towards nine o’clock, as the delirium only increased, I began to get anxious.  I bent down close to him and listened to his ravings.  Over and over again I heard the name ‘Louise.’  Why wouldn’t ‘Louise’ come to him?  It was so unkind of her—­they had dug a great pit, and were pushing him down into it—­oh! why didn’t she come and save him?  He should be saved if she would only come and take his hand.

“His cries became so pitiful that I could bear them no longer.  His wife had gone to attend a prayer-meeting, but the church was only in the next street.  Fortunately, the day-nurse had not left the house:  I called her in to watch him for a minute, and, slipping on my bonnet, ran across.  I told my errand to one of the vergers and he took me to her.  She was kneeling, but I could not wait.  I pushed open the pew door, and, bending down, whispered to her, ’Please come over at once; your husband is more delirious than I quite care about, and you may be able to calm him.’