Hilda looked up at her calmly.  “Not in the least,” she answered.  “I have nursed hundreds of cases.”

“Oh, my, how dreadful!  And never caught it?”

“Never.  I am not afraid, you see.”

“I wish I wasn’t!  Hundreds of cases!  It makes one ill to think of it! . . .  And all successfully?”

“Almost all of them.”

“You don’t tell your patients stories when they’re ill about your other cases who died, do you?” Lady Meadowcroft went on, with a quick little shudder.

Hilda’s face by this time was genuinely sympathetic.  “Oh, never!” she answered, with truth.  “That would be very bad nursing!  One’s object in treating a case is to make one’s patient well; so one naturally avoids any sort of subject that might be distressing or alarming.”

“You really mean it?” Her face was pleading.

“Why, of course.  I try to make my patients my friends; I talk to them cheerfully; I amuse them and distract them; I get them away, as far as I can, from themselves and their symptoms.”

“Oh, what a lovely person to have about one when one’s ill!” the languid lady exclaimed, ecstatically.  “I should like to send for you if I wanted nursing!  But there—­it’s always so, of course, with a real lady; common nurses frighten one so.  I wish I could always have a lady to nurse me!”

“A person who sympathises—­that is the really important thing,” Hilda answered, in her quiet voice.  “One must find out first one’s patient’s temperament.  You are nervous, I can see.”  She laid one hand on her new friend’s arm.  “You need to be kept amused and engaged when you are ill; what you require most is—­insight—­and sympathy.”

The little fist doubled up again; the vacant face grew positively sweet.  “That’s just it!  You have hit it!  How clever you are!  I want all that.  I suppose, Miss Wade, you never go out for private nursing?”

“Never,” Hilda answered.  “You see, Lady Meadowcroft, I don’t nurse for a livelihood.  I have means of my own; I took up this work as an occupation and a sphere in life.  I haven’t done anything yet but hospital nursing.”

Lady Meadowcroft drew a slight sigh.  “What a pity!” she murmured, slowly.  “It does seem hard that your sympathies should all be thrown away, so to speak, on a horrid lot of wretched poor people, instead of being spent on your own equals—­who would so greatly appreciate them.”

“I think I can venture to say the poor appreciate them, too,” Hilda answered, bridling up a little—­for there was nothing she hated so much as class-prejudices.  “Besides, they need sympathy more; they have fewer comforts.  I should not care to give up attending my poor people for the sake of the idle rich.”

The set phraseology of the country rectory recurred to Lady Meadowcroft—­“our poorer brethren,” and so forth.  “Oh, of course,” she answered, with the mechanical acquiescence such women always give to moral platitudes.  “One must do one’s best for the poor, I know—­for conscience’ sake and all that; it’s our duty, and we all try hard to do it.  But they’re so terribly ungrateful!  Don’t you think so?  Do you know, Miss Wade, in my father’s parish—­”