This nurse was a quiet, demure little woman, with a pair of dreamy, soft
gray eyes that had a curious power of absorbing everything that passed
before them without seeming to look at anything. Gazing upon much life,
laid bare, had given to them a slightly cynical expression, but there was
a background of kindliness behind.
During the evenings of my convalescence she would talk to me of her
nursing experiences. I have sometimes thought I would put down in
writing the stories that she told me, but they would be sad reading. The
majority of them, I fear, would show only the tangled, seamy side of
human nature, and God knows there is little need for us to point that out
to each other, though so many nowadays seem to think it the only work
worth doing. A few of them were sweet, but I think they were the
saddest; and over one or two a man might laugh, but it would not be a
pleasant laugh.
"I never enter the door of a house to which I have been summoned," she
said to me one evening, "without wondering, as I step over the threshold,
what the story is going to be. I always feel inside a sick-room as if I
were behind the scenes of life. The people come and go about you, and
you listen to them talking and laughing, and you look into your patient's
eyes, and you just know that it's all a play.
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