in the gloom timidly mentioned the name of Florence
Nightingale.

"One Nightingale doesn't make a base hospital," replied Kemp. "I
take off my hat--we all do--to women who are willing to undergo the
drudgery and discomfort which hospital training involves. But I'm
not talking about Florence Nightingales. The young person whom I am
referring to is just intelligent enough to understand that the only
possible thing to do this season is to nurse. She qualifies herself
for her new profession by dressing up like one of the chorus of
'The Quaker Girl,' and getting her portrait, thus attired, into the
'Tatler.' Having achieved this, she has graduated. She then proceeds
to invade any hospital that is available, where she flirts with
everything in pyjamas, and freezes you with a look if you ask her to
empty a basin or change your sheets. I know her! I've had some, and I
know her! She is one of the minor horrors of war. In peace-time she
goes out on Alexandra Day, and stands on the steps of men's clubs and
pesters the members to let her put a rose in their button-holes. What
such a girl wants is a good old-fashioned mother who knows how to put
a slipper to its right use!"

"I don't think," observed Wagstaffe, since Kemp had apparently
concluded his philippic, "that young girls are the only people who
lose their heads. Consider all the poisonous young blighters that one
sees about town just now. Their uplift is enormous, and their manners
in public horrid; and they hardly know enough about their new job to
stand at attention when they hear 'God Save the King.' In fact, they
deserve to be nursed by your little friends, Bobby!"

"They are all that you say," conceded Kemp. "But after all, they do
have a fairly stiff time of it on duty, and they are going to have a
much stiffer time later on. And they are not going to back out when
the romance of the new uniform wears off, remember. Now these girls
will play the angel-of-mercy game for a week or two, and then jack up
and confine their efforts to getting hold of a wounded officer and
taking him to the theatre. It is _dernier cri_ to take a wounded
officer about with you at present. Wounded officers have quite
superseded Pekinese, I am told."

"Women certainly are the most extraordinary creatures," mused Ayling,
a platoon commander of "B." "In private life I am a beak at a public
school--"

"What school?" inquired several voices. Ayling gave the name, found
that there were two of