There were
other rights. There was another side to the medal. Purity and
high-mindedness--the beautiful, but unbearable tyranny. The
beautiful, unbearable tyranny of Miss Frost! It was time now for
Miss Frost to die. It was time for that perfected flower to be
gathered to immortality. A lovely _immortel_. But an obstruction to
other, purple and carmine blossoms which were in bud on the stem. A
lovely edelweiss--but time it was gathered into eternity.
Black-purple and red anemones were due, real Adonis blood, and
strange individual orchids, spotted and fantastic. Time for Miss
Frost to die. She, Alvina, who loved her as no one else would ever
love her, with that love which goes to the core of the universe,
knew that it was time for her darling to be folded, oh, so gently
and softly, into immortality. Mortality was busy with the day after
her day. It was time for Miss Frost to die. As Alvina sat motionless
in the train, running from Woodhouse to Tibshelf, it decided itself
in her.

She was glad to be back in Islington, among all the horrors of her
confinement cases. The doctors she knew hailed her. On the whole,
these young men had not any too deep respect for the nurses as a
whole. Why drag in respect? Human functions were too obviously
established to make any great fuss about. And so the doctors put
their arms round Alvina's waist, because she was plump, and they
kissed her face, because the skin was soft. And she laughed and
squirmed a little, so that they felt all the more her warmth and
softness under their arm's pressure.

"It's no use, you know," she said, laughing rather breathless, but
looking into their eyes with a curious definite look of unchangeable
resistance. This only piqued them.

"What's no use?" they asked.

She shook her head slightly.

"It isn't any use your behaving like that with me," she said, with
the same challenging definiteness, finality: a flat negative.

"Who're you telling?" they said.

For she did not at all forbid them to "behave like that." Not in the
least. She almost encouraged them. She laughed and arched her eyes
and flirted. But her backbone became only the stronger and firmer.
Soft and supple as she was, her backbone never yielded for an
instant. It could not. She had to confess that she liked the young
doctors. They were alert, their faces were clean and bright-looking.
She liked the sort of intimacy with them, when they kissed her and
wrestled with her in the empty lab