The Lost Girl

her mood of submission and sweetness. In

chester House extremely. "I know I can't. I can't bear it. I simply can't bear it, and there's an end of it. I can'

ike a taunt, in her voice

" asked Miss Frost, knitting

away," said

ight hand, of helpless impatience. It was s

u want to go?" a

" said Alvina. "Anywhere, if

gone to Australia?"

etorted Alvina with a rude laugh. "Australia

curious insolence which sometimes came out in

itated: "if you knew what you wanted

a nurse," rapp

ing woman, and looked at her charge. She believed that Alvina was jus

e would certainly never have entertained it. But she had heard Alexander speak of Nurse This and Sister That. And so she had r

do you feel yourself fitted to be a n

looked strangely, even outrageously, at her governess. "I want to be a materni

at time, insistently, when she was giving music lessons, sitting close beside her pupi

idea into your head,

os

Alvina, still more

mean it, dear," said

y should I say

ything to escape the arch, br

out it," she said, num

ill on her face. But her heart was sore. She wanted to cry, and fling herself on the breast of her darling. Bu

n. She persisted. They all waited for the old loving Vina to be herself again. But the new and recalcitrant Vina still shone hard. She found a copy of The Lancet, and saw an advertisement of a home in Islington where maternity

ious perverseness, Alvina must have intended it to be. Mrs. Houghton assumed a remote air of silence, as if she did not hear any more, did not belong. She lapsed far away. She was r

hton. "A maternity nurse! What exact

r curtly. "That's it, isn't it? It is a

se," said Alv

ce of painfully thin hair uncover his baldness. "I can't understand that any young girl of any-any upbri

" said Alvi

oes-" said Miss Pi

didn't-but neither did he see any great harm in it. At that time it was rather the thing for young ladies to enter the nursing

r nursing outfit. Instead of a trousseau, nurse's uniforms in fine blue-and-white stripe, with great white aprons. Inst

f the old, tender, sensitive, shrinking Vina-the exquisitely sensitive and nervous, loving girl? No, astounding as it may seem, there was no return of such a creature. Alvina

cab, and still she looked out on the ghastly dilapidated flat facades of Islington, and still she smiled brightly, as if there were some charm in it all. Perhaps for her there was a charm in it all. Perhaps it acted like a tonic on the little devil in her breast. Perhaps if she had seen tufts of snowdrops-it was February-and yew-hedges and cottage windows, she would have broken down. As it was, she just enjoyed

matting, otherwise bare. Then up bare stairs to a room where a stout, pale, common woman with two warts on her face, was drinking tea. It was three o'clock. This was the matron. The matron soon deposited her in a bedroom, not very small, but bare and hard and dusty-seeming, and there left her. Alvina sat down on her chair, looked at her box opposite her, looked round the uninviting room, and smiled to herself. Then she rose and went to the

gas-jet, which roared faintly, and drew down a crackly dark-green bl

d Alvina, and th

k her black tea and ate

s in similar circumstances. There is no need to go

o well with women of her own age-or older than herself. She was ready with a laugh and a word, and though she was unable to venture on indecencies herself, yet she had an amazing faculty for looking knowing and indecent beyond words

with it all, and it all passed off as easy as winking. She swung her haunches and arched her eyes with the best of them. And they behaved as if

leer. She had it all in a fortnight. And never once did she feel anything but exhilarated and in full swing. It seemed to her she had not a moment's time to brood or reflect about things-she was too much in the swing. Every moment, in the swing, living, or active in full swi

There she met the doctors and students. Well, a pretty lot they were, one way and another. When she had put on flesh and become pink and bouncing she was just their sort

ysteria. But the dreadful things she saw in the lying-in hospital, and afterwards, went deep, and finished her youth and her tutelage for ever. How many infernos deeper than Mis

of sanitary inspectors. But what did the woman, the sufferer, herself care! She ground her teeth and screamed and yelled with pains. In her calm periods she lay stupid and indifferent

hardest lessons Alvina had to learn-to bully these people, in their own hovels, into some sort of obedience to her commands, and some sort of respect for her presence. She had to fight tooth and nail for this end. And in a week she was as hard and callous to them as they to her. And so her work was well done. She did not hate them. There they were. They had a certain life, and you had to take them at their own worth in their own way. What else! If o

inclinations and a pure, "high" mind. Well, so she was, in the more-or-less exhausted part of herself. But high-mindedness had really come to an end with James Houghton, had really reached the point, not only of pathetic, but of dry and anti-human, repulsive qui

but adjust it to its own complement. And so with high-mindedness. It is but one side of the medal-the crowned reverse. O

e down tails. Heads or tails? Heads for gen

like another being. She was not herself, said Everybody. When she came home to Woodhouse at Easter, in her bonnet and cloak, everybody was simply knocked out. Imagine that this frail, pa

Vina

e knew how they

th," said her father, sarcasticall

at's a go

at breakfast, as Alvina ate rather rapidly and rather well, th

ged you a

y." And she gave the arch look with he

oung men, and the jolly good time she had with them. And her blue-grey eyes seemed to have become harder and greyer, lighter somehow. In her wistfulness and her tender pathos, Alvina's eyes would deepen thei

have you betrayed yourself with any of these young men?" But coldly her heart abstained from asking-or ev

orid laugh, which would lead a chaste, generous woman like Miss Frost to imagine-well, she merely abstained from imagining anything. She had that strength of mind. She never for one moment attempted to answer the question to herself, as to whether Alvina had be

re all praying

Alvina involuntarily, wit

her stout figure standing very still and unchangeable, under its coat and skirt of dark purple, the white hair glistening under the folded dark hat. Alvina threw herself down on the seat of he

mmortel. 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 e

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

hless, but looking into their eyes with a curious defini

o use?" t

her head

with me," she said, with the same challeng

u telling?

and wrestled with her in the empty laboratories or corridors-often in the intervals of most critical and appalling cases. She liked their arm round her waist, the kisses as she reached back her face, straining away, the sometimes desperate struggles. They took unpardonable liberties. They pinched her haunches and attacked her in unheard-of ways. Sometimes her blood really came up in the fight, and she felt as if, with her hands, she could tear any man, any mal

at her, as if she were Woman itself, some creature not quite personal. What they noticed, all of them, was the way her brown hair looped over her ears. There was something chaste, and noble, and war-like about it

er isolate self-sufficiency in the fray, her wild, overweening backbone, they were ready to attend on her and serve her. Headley in particular hoped he might overcome her. He was a well-buil

g less than magical the way the soft, slumbering body of the woman could leap in one jet into terrible, overwhelming voltaic force, something strange and massive, at the first treacherous touch of the man's determined hand. His strength was so different fro

ood acquaintances. They were more or less matched. But as he found himself continua

g to catch her out with his quickness. She liked his fine, slim limbs, and his exaggerated generosity. He would ask her out to

urse," he said to her, "you a

ot impressed

are so knowing: particularly of a woman's secrets. It is a strange thing that these childish men have such a deep, half-pervers

nearly melted her. She could almost have succumbed to him. If it had not been that with him there was no question of succumbing. She would have had to take him between her hands and caress and cajole him like a che

nyhow? Didn't she rather despise it? To sin in thought was as bad as to sin in act. If the thought was the same as the act, how much m

p. She was returning to Woodhouse virgin as she had left it. In a measure she felt herself beaten. Why? Who knows. But so it was, she felt herself beaten, condemned to go back to what she was before. Fate

fully-qualified maternity nurse, she was going to bring all the babies of the district easily and triumphantly into the world. She was going to charge the regulation fee of two guineas a case: and even on a modest estimate of ten babies a month, sh

into Woodhouse to