e fear of
making a mistake--forgetting something, like the juice of a half orange
at ten o'clock in the morning, the omission of which might have--who
knew what disastrous consequences!

That attitude can't last any woman long, and Rose, with her wonderfully
clever hands, her wits trained--as the wits of persons who had worked
for John Galbraith were always trained--not to be told the same thing
twice, her pride keeping in sharp focus the determination that Rodney
should see that she could be as good a nurse as Miss French--Rose wore
off that nervous tenseness over her new job very quickly. Within a week
she had a routine established that was noiseless--frictionless.

But do you remember how aghast she was over the forty weeks John
Galbraith had talked about as the probable run of _The Girl Up-stairs_;
her consternation over the idea of just going on doing the same thing
over and over again, "around and round, like a horse at the end of a
pole"? What she would like to do, she had told him, now that this was
done, was to begin on something else.

Well, it was with something the same feeling of consternation that,
having thrown herself heart and soul into the task of planning and
setting in motion a routine for two year-and-a-half-old babies, she
found herself straightening up and saying "What next?" And realizing,
that as far as this job was concerned, there was no "next." The supreme
merit of her care, from now on, would be--barring emergencies--the
placid continuation of that routine. There were no heroics about
motherhood--save in emergency, once more. It was a question of
remembering a hundred trivial details, and executing them in the same
way every day. It was a question of doing a thousand little services,
not one of which was serious enough to occupy her mind, every one of
which was capable of being done almost automatically--but not quite! The
whole of the attention was never quite taken, and yet it was never, all
the way around the clock, entirely left free. And her love for them,
which had become almost as intense and overmastering a thing as her love
for her husband, could never be expressed fully, as was her love for
him. It would be cruelly unfair, she recognized that, to emotionalize
over them--force them.

It was a fine relation. It was, perhaps, the very finest in the world.
But as a job, it wasn't so satisfactory. Four-fifths of it, anyway,
could be done with better results for the children by a pla