our part, and carelessness
of the impression we are making upon the audience. We are too weak to
put the paint and powder on our faces, the stage finery lies unheeded by
our side. The heroic gestures, the virtuous sentiments are a weariness
to us. In the quiet, darkened room, where the foot-lights of the great
stage no longer glare upon us, where our ears are no longer strained to
catch the clapping or the hissing of the town, we are, for a brief space,
ourselves.

This nurse was a quiet, demure little woman, with a pair of dreamy, soft
gray eyes that had a curious power of absorbing everything that passed
before them without seeming to look at anything. Gazing upon much life,
laid bare, had given to them a slightly cynical expression, but there was
a background of kindliness behind.

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