Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/404

Rh but there were enough without her, and there were other cares which, for the moment, she only could assume—the despatching of messages to the scattered family, the incessant telephoning and telegraphing to town, the general guidance of the household swinging rudderless in the tide of disaster. Cicely, above all, must be watched over and guarded from alarm. The little governess, reduced to a twittering heap of fears, had been quarantined in a distant room till reason returned to her; and the child, meanwhile, slept quietly in the old nurse’s care.

Cicely would wake presently, and Justine must go up to her with a bright face; other duties would press thick on the heels of this; their feet were already on the threshold. But meanwhile she could only follow in imagination what was going on in the other room.…

She had often thought with dread of such a contingency. She always sympathized too much with her patients—she knew it was the joint in her armour. Her quick-gushing pity lay too near that professional exterior which she had managed to endue with such a bright glaze of insensibility that some sentimental patients—without much the matter—had been known to call her “a little hard.” How, then, should she steel herself if it fell to her lot to witness a cruel accident to some one she loved, and to have to perform [ 388 ]