The Romantics by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Author:Mary Roberts Rinehart [Roberts Rinehart, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784088262
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2013-07-16T20:06:00+00:00

An Error in Treatment

THE DAY ANNE APPLIED for admission to the training school was the very first time she had even seen the inside of a hospital. She noticed the smell of it the moment she entered: lysol and formaldehyde and soap, all mixed together into something indescribable. And she put her handkerchief to her nose. It was a very nice nose, by the way.

However, nobody was yelling or anything of that sort at the time, and that made it easier.

But the moment the head of the training school saw her, and gathered what she was after, she said, “My dear child, you are so very young!”

“I am older than I look,” said Anne. “I shall soon be—” And then she had swallowed and told a white lie. Not her first; she was a perfectly normal young woman. “I shall soon be twenty,” she said. And she went on, rather red from the effort, to enumerate her accomplishments. “I have nursed a lot, really,” she said breathlessly. “People and dogs and—and everything. And I speak French and I can make people comfortable. I really can. And that’s important in nursing, isn’t it?”

“Very important indeed,” said the head, and glanced thoughtfully over Anne’s shoulder at an old photograph of a young man on her table.

It was the enlargement of a snapshot, and rather out of focus, but she was used to that after all those years. And the photograph distinctly said, “Don’t be foolish. She’s too young. Send her home and let her live her own life.”

“But I don’t get many of this sort now,” she pleaded. “Not since the war.”

Anne, of course, heard nothing of all this. It was strictly sotto voce. She had been staring out the window, to where an irascible old gentleman in a wheeled chair was stealthily feeding a cat with something he had hidden in his pocket. He was pretending to be doing nothing of the sort, but she saw it distinctly.

“I like old people, too,” she said suddenly. “And old people like me too. I—I humor them.”

The head simply turned her back on the photograph. What else could she do? As she had said to the picture, she didn’t have many applicants like this one nowadays, and the war enthusiasts hadn’t stuck at all. The very first sight of a small insect with a long name—pediculosis, it is called on the symptom charts—had usually cooled their fine frenzy, and a morning over sputum cups generally finished them.

Anne was trying to think of her other accomplishments.

“I am really quite strong, too,” she said. “I don’t look it, but I am. I’ve played golf and ridden a great deal. I could lift. I know that.”

“Have you no family?” asked the head, weakening by inches.

“I have a father and a—stepmother,” said Anne, and looked away. There were some things she didn’t care to talk about. And the stepmother simply finished matters for the head.

“I am going to try you, Miss—” she looked at the visiting card in her hand—“Miss Rutherford.

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