Hilda Wade herself I will not formally introduce to you:  you will learn to know her as I proceed with my story.

I was Sebastian’s assistant, and my recommendation soon procured Hilda Wade the post she so strangely coveted.  Before she had been long at Nathaniel’s, however, it began to dawn upon me that her reasons for desiring to attend upon our revered Master were not wholly and solely scientific.  Sebastian, it is true, recognised her value as a nurse from the first; he not only allowed that she was a good assistant, but he also admitted that her subtle knowledge of temperament sometimes enabled her closely to approach his own reasoned scientific analysis of a case and its probable development.  “Most women,” he said to me once, “are quick at reading the passing emotion.  They can judge with astounding correctness from a shadow on one’s face, a catch in one’s breath, a movement of one’s hands, how their words or deeds are affecting us.  We cannot conceal our feelings from them.  But underlying character they do not judge so well as fleeting expression.  Not what Mrs. Jones is in herself, but what Mrs. Jones is now thinking and feeling—­there lies their great success as psychologists.  Most men, on the contrary, guide their life by definite facts—­by signs, by symptoms, by observed data.  Medicine itself is built upon a collection of such reasoned facts.  But this woman, Nurse Wade, to a certain extent, stands intermediate mentally between the two sexes.  She recognises temperament—­the fixed form of character, and what it is likely to do—­in a degree which I have never seen equalled elsewhere.  To that extent, and within proper limits of supervision, I acknowledge her faculty as a valuable adjunct to a scientific practitioner.”

Still, though Sebastian started with a predisposition in favour of Hilda Wade—­a pretty girl appeals to most of us—­I could see from the beginning that Hilda Wade was by no means enthusiastic for Sebastian, like the rest of the hospital: 

“He is extraordinarily able,” she would say, when I gushed to her about our Master; but that was the most I could ever extort from her in the way of praise.  Though she admitted intellectually Sebastian’s gigantic mind, she would never commit herself to anything that sounded like personal admiration.  To call him “the prince of physiologists” did not satisfy me on that head.  I wanted her to exclaim, “I adore him!  I worship him!  He is glorious, wonderful!”

I was also aware from an early date that, in an unobtrusive way, Hilda Wade was watching Sebastian, watching him quietly, with those wistful, earnest eyes, as a cat watches a mouse-hole; watching him with mute inquiry, as if she expected each moment to see him do something different from what the rest of us expected of him.  Slowly I gathered that Hilda Wade, in the most literal sense, had come to Nathaniel’s, as she herself expressed it, “to be near Sebastian.”