Page:The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909).djvu/65

 text-books will be provided or you will receive a small allowance which will cover these expenses. Your hours will be practically twelve a day, with brief respites during each day for outdoor exercise, a half-holiday each week, and generally half of each Sunday. Two weeks' vacation is granted during the summer. You will live at the home for nurses connected with the hospital and will be subject to its rules and regulations, precisely as if you were a hospital patient instead of a nurse.

If you are unwilling to give up this much time, this much strength, this much liberty, to prepare for the profession, do not aim to be a trained nurse. Nothing short of this will prepare you.

It seems hardly necessary to outline the career of a nurse after graduation, but as many girls desire such particulars, I will add that in cities of any size the graduate nurse who has aroused the favorable interest of physicians connected with the hospital seldom lacks work at $25 a week. On the other hand, experienced nurses declare that the work is so exacting and so wearing, physically and nervously, that no graduate nurse should attempt to work more than ten months in a year, which means that her cash income will be a thousand dollars a year. Her board is of course included wherever she nurses, but she generally maintains a resi-