Nurse in White Read Free

making few friends among her associates because of her highhanded, hard-boiled manner, yet standing well in her classes and with the faculty in general.
    Each new intern became her immediate prey, for a brief space, to be promptly dropped after a stolen date or two. The girls in the house soon ceased to remonstrate and to warn. Ann apparently possessed a charmed life. She was never found out and, oddly enough, the men whom she disparagingly dubbed “pansies” were far more loyal to her than she was to them.
    No one could understand Ellen’s friendship for her. The two were so dissimilar. And yet as the months passed there was formed a strong and very real bond of deep affection between them. Sometimes to be sure, Ann’s attitude of guardian—of self-appointed mentor, irked; but for the most part Ellen submitted to the older girl’s rather dictatorial manner with amused tolerance. Ann meant well. Ann was city born and bred and had all the urbanite’s mistaken ideas of a country girl’s inability to take care of herself. And it was Ann who stood close to Ellen during that first day in the operating room when, as the gleaming knife in the hands of the senior surgeon’s magic fingers cut cleanly through the pink flesh of a small boy, Ellen saw Dr. MacGowan rise and fall in the most fantastic manner and felt wave after wave of deathly nausea assail her. It was Ann who pinched her arm and kept her upright throughout the ordeal.
    It was Ann who broke rules to come to her on that first Christmas Eve when small Eloise Baker slipped out of her scarred and tortured body and Thompson, the nurse in charge, became hysterical and fled. Thompson had grown to love that tiny, pain-racked baby and couldn’t watch her die. It was Ellen’s first experience with death and somehow, Ann, up in Male Surgical had heard of the Thompson debacle and thought of Ellen—alone. She found her quietly bathing the little body while tears streamed down her face.
    “You poor kid!” Ann whispered huskily.
    “I—I’m not crying because I was left here alone, Ann,” Ellen told her, “or because I’m afraid. I’m crying because I’m glad—glad that now Eloise won’t have to suffer anymore. Think of it, Ann—it’s Christmas Eve and she’s—she’s got a brand-new body!”
    “You poor kid!” Ann repeated and stayed to help until Thompson, a white, shaken and vastly ashamed Thompson, returned.
    Ellen couldn’t forget that side of Ann’s nature and chose to ignore the other side.
    So the months passed. Months of hard work and rigid discipline. Months when nothing but Ellen’s loyalty to her pledge kept her from open rebellion. For, being willing and more than ordinarily docile, some of the nurses took advantage and sometimes shifted their responsibility to her slender and already burdened shoulders. Ann called her an easy mark, but Ellen refused to complain. So Ann deepened the enmity of several of her associates because she told them quite frankly what she thought of them and threatened to take it up with Forsyth or even MacGowan.
    And as Ann lost favor with the girls in Anthony Ware, Ellen gained it. She was so willing—so smilingly happy in her work, that it was impossible to be with her and not feel one’s spirits lift and one’s outlook on life brighten. She was perhaps the most popular girl in training, and the prettiest.
    Ellen’s first year was suddenly completed; her second and part of her senior year. She had changed—grown up. She was still somewhat emotional—still felt keenly the dignity of her calling, but she had developed a firmness, only hinted at before, and a rather quick temper that surprised herself and delighted Ann.
    Another September and a new crop of probationers—-a new crop of interns. MacGowan’s reputation took a sudden spurt after that famous operation on Senator McGill who had fallen from his horse and was thought to be fatally injured. Miracle Man he was called, much to his displeasure. Mac claimed