It was the other room-mate this time. The only real aristocrat in
the whole graduating class, high-browed, high-cheekboned,--eyes like
some far-sighted young prophet,--mouth even yet faintly arrogant
with the ineradicable consciousness of caste,--a plain, eager,
stripped-for-a-long-journey type of face,--this was Helene Churchill.
There was certainly no innocuous bloom of country hills and pastures in
this girl's face, nor any seething small-town passion pounding
indiscriminately at all the doors of experience. The men and women who
had bred Helene Churchill had been the breeders also of brick and
granite cities since the world was new.
Like one infinitely more accustomed to treading on Persian carpets than
on painted floors she came forward into the room.
"Hello, children!" she said casually, and began at once without further
parleying to take down the motto that graced her own bureau-top.
It was the era when almost everybody in the world had a motto over his
bureau. Helene Churchill's motto was: _Inasmuch As Ye Have Done It Unto
One Of The Least Of These Ye Have Done It Unto Me_. On a scroll of
almost priceless parchment the text was illuminated with inimitable
Florentine skill and color. A little carelessly, after the manner of
people quite accustomed to priceless things, she proceeded now to roll
the parchment into its smallest possible circumference, humming
exclusively to herself all the while an intricate little air from an
Italian opera.
So the three faces foiled each other, sober city girl, pert town girl,
bucolic country girl,--a hundred fundamental differences rampant between
them, yet each fervid, adolescent young mouth tamed to the same
monotonous, drolly exaggerated expression of complacency that
characterizes the faces of all people who, in a distinctive uniform, for
a reasonably satisfactory living wage, make an actual profession of
righteous deeds.
Indeed among all the thirty or more varieties of noble expression which
an indomitable Superintendent had finally succeeded in inculcating into
her graduating class, no other physiognomies had responded more
plastically perhaps than these three to the merciless imprint of the
great _hospital machine_ which, in pursuance of its one repetitive
design, _discipline_, had coaxed Zillah Forsyth into the semblance of a
lady, snubbed Helene Churchill into the substance of plain womanhood,
and, still uncertain just what to do with Rae Malgregor's rollicking
rural immaturity, had frozen her face temporarily into the smugly
dimpled likeness of a fancy French doll rigged out as a nurse for some
gilt-edged hospital fair.
With characteristic desire to keep up in every way with her more mature,
better educated classmates, to do everything, in fact, so fast, so well,
that no one should possibly guess that she hadn't yet figured out just
why she was doing it at all, Rae Malgregor now with quickly readjusted
cap and collar began to hurl herself into the task of her own packing.
From her open bureau drawer, with a sudden impish impulse towards
worldly wisdom, she extracted first of all the photograph of the young
brakeman.
"See, Helene! My new beau!" she giggled experimentally.
In mild-eyed surprise Helene Churchill glanced up from her work. "_Your_
beau?" she corrected. "Why, that's Zillah's picture."
"Well, it's mine now!" snapped Rae Malgregor with unexpected edginess.
"It's mine now all right. Zillah said I could have him! Zillah said I
could--write to him--if I wanted to!" she finished a bit breathlessly.
Wider and wider Helene Churchill's eyes dilated. "Write to a man--whom
you don't know?" she gasped. "Why, Rae! Why, it isn't even--very
nice--to have a picture of a man you don't know!"
Mockingly to the edge of her strong white teeth Rae Malgregor's tongue
crept out in pink derision. "Bah!" she taunted. "What's 'nice'? That's
the whole matter with you, Helene Churchill! You never stop to consider
whether anything's fun or not; all you care is whether it's 'nice'!"
Excitedly she turned to meet the cheap little wink from Zillah's
sainted eyes. "Bah! What's 'nice'?" she persisted a little lamely. Then
suddenly all the pertness within her crumbled into nothingness.
"That's--the--whole trouble with you, Zillah Forsyth!" she stammered.
"You never give a hang whether anything's nice or not; all you care is
whether it's fun!" Quite helplessly she began to wring her hands. "Oh,
how do I know which one of you girls to follow?" she demanded wildly.
"How do I know anything? How does anybody know anything?"
Like a smoldering fuse the rambling query crept back into the inner
recesses of her brain and fired once more the one great question that
lay dormant there. Impetuously she ran forward and stared into Helene
Churchill's face. "How do you know you were meant to be a Trained Nurse,
Helene Churchill?" she began all over again. "How does anybody know she
was really meant to be one? How can anybody, I mean, be perfectly sure?"
Like a drowning man clutching out at the proverbial straw, she clutched
at the parchment in Helene Churchill's hand. "I mean--where did you get
your motto, Helene Churchill?" she persisted with increasing
irritability. "If--you don't tell me--I'll tear the whole thing to
pieces!"
With a startled frown Helene Churchill jerked back out of reach. "What's
the matter with you, Rae?" she quizzed sharply, and then turning round
quite casually to her book-case began to draw from the shelves one by one
her beloved Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth, Robert Browning. "Oh, I did so
want to go to China," she confided irrelevantly. "But my family have
just written me that they won't stand for it. So I suppose I'll have to
go into tenement work here in the city instead." With a visible effort
she jerked her mind back again to the feverish question in Rae
Malgregor's eyes. "Oh, you want to know where I got my motto?" she
asked. A flash of intuition brightened suddenly across her
absent-mindedness. "Oh!" she smiled, "you mean you want to know--just
what the incident was that first made me decide to--devote my life
to--to humanity?"
"Yes!" snapped Rae Malgregor.
A little shyly Helene Churchill picked up her copy of Marcus Aurelius
and cuddled her cheek against its tender Morocco cover. "Really?" she
questioned with palpable hesitation. "Really you want to know? Why,
why--it's rather a--sacred little story to me. I wouldn't exactly want
to have anybody--laugh about it."
"I'll laugh if I want to!" attested Zillah Forsyth forcibly from the
other side of the room.
Like a pugnacious boy, Rae Malgregor's fluent fingers doubled up into
two firm fists.
"I'll punch her if she even looks as though she wanted to!" she signaled
surreptitiously to Helene.
Shrewdly for an instant the city girl's narrowing eyes challenged and
appraised the country girl's desperate sincerity. Then quite abruptly
she began her little story.
"Why, it was on an Easter Sunday--Oh, ages and ages ago," she faltered.
"Why, I couldn't have been more than nine years old at the time." A
trifle self-consciously she turned her face away from Zillah Forsyth's
supercilious smile. "And I was coming home from a Sunday school festival
in my best white muslin dress with a big pot of purple pansies in my
hand," she hastened somewhat nervously to explain. "And just at the edge
of the gutter there was a dreadful drunken man lying in the mud with a
great crowd of cruel people teasing and tormenting him. And,
because--because I couldn't think of anything else to do about it,
I--I walked right up to the poor old creature,--scared as I could
be--and--and I presented him with my pot of purple pansies. And
everybody of course began to laugh, to scream, I mean, and shout with
amusement. And I, of course, began to cry. And the old drunken man
straightened up very oddly for an instant, with his battered hat in one
hand and the pot of pansies in the other,--and he raised the pot of
pansies very high, as though it had been a glass of rarest wine--and
bowed to me as--reverently as though he had been toasting me at my
father's table at some very grand dinner. And 'Inasmuch!' he said. Just
that,--'Inasmuch!' So that's how I happened to go into nursing!" she
finished as abruptly as she had begun. Like some wonderful
phosphorescent manifestation her whole shining soul seemed to flare
forth suddenly through her plain face.
With honest perplexity Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work.
"So that's--how you happened to go into nursing?" she quizzed
impatiently. Her long, straight nose was all puckered tight with
interrogation. Her dove-like eyes were fairly dilated with slow-dawning
astonishment. "You--don't--mean?" she gasped. "You don't mean that--just
for that--?" Incredulously she jumped to her feet and stood staring
blankly into the city girl's strangely illuminated features.
"Well, if I were a swell--like you!" she scoffed, "it would take a heap
sight more than a drunken man munching pansies and rum and Bible-texts
to--to jolt me out of my limousines and steam yachts and Adirondack
bungalows!"
Quite against all intention Helene Churchill laughed. She did not often
laugh. Just for an instant her eyes and Zillah Forsyth's clashed
together in the irremediable antagonism of caste,--the Plebeian's
scornful impatience with the Aristocrat, equaled only by the
Aristocrat's condescending patience with the Plebeian.
It was no more than right that the Aristocrat should recover her
self-possession first. "Never mind about your understanding. Zillah
dear," she said softly. "Your hair is the most beautiful thing I ever
saw in my life!"
Along Zillah Forsyth's ivory cheek an incongruous little flush of red
began to show. With much more nonchalance than was really necessary she
pointed towards her half-packed trunk.
"It wasn't--Sunday school--I was coming home from--when I got my motto!"
she remarked dryly, with a wink at no one in particular. "And, so far as
I know," she proceeded with increasing sarcasm, "the man who inspired my
noble life was not in any way--particularly addicted to the use of
alcoholic beverages!" As though her collar was suddenly too tight she
rammed her finger down between her stiff white neck-band and her soft
white throat. "He was a--New York doctor!" she hastened somewhat airily
to explain. "Gee! But he was a swell! And he was spending his summer
holiday up in the same Maine town where I was tending soda fountain.
And he used to drop into the drug-store, nights, after cigars and
things. And he used to tell me stories about the drugs and things,
sitting up there on the counter swinging his legs and pointing out this
and that,--quinine, ipecac, opium, hasheesh,--all the silly patent
medicines, every sloppy soothing syrup! Lordy! He knew 'em as though
they were people! Where they come from! Where they're going to! Yarns
about the tropics that would kink the hair along the nape of your neck!
Jokes about your own town's soup-kettle pharmacology that would make you
yell for joy! Gee! But the things that man had seen and known! Gee! But
the things that man could make you see and know! And he had an
automobile," she confided proudly. "It was one of those billion dollar
French cars. And I lived just round the corner from the drug-store. But
we used to ride home by way of--New Hampshire!"
Almost imperceptibly her breath began to quicken. "Gee! Those nights!"
she muttered. "Rain or shine, moon or thunder,--tearing down those
country roads at forty miles an hour, singing, hollering, whispering!
It was him that taught me to do my hair like this--instead of all the
cheap rats and pompadours every other kid in town was wearing," she
asserted, quite irrelevantly; then stopped with a quick, furtive glance
of suspicion towards both her listeners and mouthed her way delicately
back to the beginning of her sentence again. "It was _he_ that taught me
to do my hair like this," she repeated with the faintest possible
suggestion of hauteur.
For one reason or another along the exquisitely chaste curve of her
cheek a narrow streak of red began to show again.
"And he went away very sudden at the last," she finished hurriedly. "It
seems he was married all the time." Blandly she turned her wonderful
face to the caressing light. "And--I hope he goes to Hell!" she added
perfectly simply.
With a little gasp of astonishment, shock, suspicion, distaste, Helene
Churchill reached out an immediate conscientious hand to her.
"Oh, Zillah!" she began. "Oh, poor Zillah dear! I'm so--sorry! I'm so--"
Absolutely serenely, through a mask of insolence and ice, Zillah
Forsyth ignored the proffered hand.
"I don't know what particular call you've got to be sorry for me, Helene
Churchill," she drawled languidly. "I've got my character, same as
you've got yours. And just about nine times as many good looks. And when
it comes to nursing--" Like an alto song pierced suddenly by one shrill
treble note, the girl's immobile face sharpened transiently with a
single jagged flash of emotion. "And when it comes to nursing? Ha!
Helene Churchill! You can lead your class all you want to with your
silk-lined manners and your fuddy-duddy book-talk! But when genteel
people like you are moping round all ready to fold your patients' hands
on their breasts and murmur 'Thy will be done,'--why, that's the time
that little 'yours truly' is just beginning to roll up her sleeves and
get to work!"
With real passion her slender fingers went clutching again at her harsh
linen collar. "It isn't you, Helene Churchill," she taunted, "that's
ever been to the Superintendent on your bended knees and begged for the
rabies cases--and the small-pox! Gee! You like nursing because you
think it's pious to like it! But I like it--_because I like it!"_ From
brow to chin as though fairly stricken with sincerity her whole bland
face furrowed startlingly with crude expressiveness. "The smell of
ether!" she stammered. "It's like wine to me! The clang of the ambulance
gong? I'd rather hear it than fire-engines! I'd crawl on my hands and
knees a hundred miles to watch a major operation! I wish there was a
war! I'd give my life to see a cholera epidemic!"
Abruptly as it came the passion faded from her face, leaving every
feature tranquil again, demure, exaggeratedly innocent. With saccharine
sweetness she turned to Rae Malgregor.
"Now, Little One," she mocked, "tell us the story of your lovely life.
Having heard me coyly confess that I went into nursing because I had
such a crush on this world,--and Helene here brazenly affirm that she
went into nursing because she had such a crush on the world to
come,--it's up to you now to confide to us just how you happened to take
up so noble an endeavor! Had you seen some of the young house doctors'
beautiful, smiling faces depicted in the hospital catalogue? Or was it
for the sake of the Senior Surgeon's grim, gray mug that you jilted your
poor plow-boy lover way up in the Annapolis Valley?"
"Why, Zillah!" gasped the country girl. "Why, I think you 're perfectly
awful! Why, Zillah Forsyth! Don't you ever say a thing like that again!
You can joke all you want to about the flirty young Internes. They're
nothing but fellows. But it isn't--it isn't respectful--for you to talk
like that about the Senior Surgeon. He's too--too terrifying!" she
finished in an utter panic of consternation.
"Oh, now I know it was the Senior Surgeon that made you jilt your
country beau!" taunted Zillah Forsyth with soft alto sarcasm.
"I didn't, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine!" stormed Rae Malgregor
explosively. Backed up against her bureau, eyes flaming, breast heaving,
little candy-box cap all tossed askew over her left ear, she stood
defying her tormentor. "I didn't, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine!" she
reasserted passionately. "It was Joe Hazeltine that jilted me! And we
'd been going together since we were kids! And now he's married the
dominie's daughter and they've got a kid of their own most as old as he
and I were when we first began courting each other. And it's all because
I insisted on being a trained nurse," she finished shrilly.
With an expression of real shock Helene Churchill peered up from her
lowly seat on the floor.
"You mean?" she asked a bit breathlessly. "You mean that he didn't want
you to be a trained nurse? You mean that he wasn't big enough,--wasn't
fine enough to appreciate the nobility of the profession?"
"Nobility nothing!" snapped Rae Malgregor. "It was me scrubbing strange
men with alcohol that he couldn't stand for! And I don't know as I
exactly blame him," she added huskily. "It certainly is a good deal of a
liberty when you stop to think about it."
Quite incongruously her big, childish, blue eyes narrowed suddenly into
two dark, calculating slits. "It's comic," she mused, "how there isn't a
man in the world who would stand letting his wife or daughter or sister
have a male nurse. But look at the jobs we girls get sent out on! It's
very confusing!"
With sincere appeal she turned to Zillah Forsyth. "And yet--and yet,"
she stammered. "And yet--when everything scary that's in you has once
been scared out of you,--why, there's nothing left in you to be scared
_with_ any more, is there?"
"What? What?" pleaded Helene Churchill. "Say it again! What?"
"That's what Joe and I quarreled about my first vacation home!"
persisted Rae Malgregor. "It was a traveling salesman's thigh. It was
broken bad. Somebody had to take care of it. So I did! Joe thought it
wasn't modest to be so willing." With a perplexed sort of defiance she
raised her square little chin. "But you see I was willing!" she said.
"I was perfectly willing. Just one single solitary year of hospital
training had made me perfectly willing. And you can't _un_-willing a
willing--even to please your beau, no matter how hard you try!" With a
droll admixture of shyness and disdain she tossed her curly blonde head
a trifle higher. "Shucks!" she attested. "What's a traveling salesman's
thigh?"
"Shucks yourself!" scoffed Zillah Forsyth. "What's a silly beau or two
up in Nova Scotia to a girl with looks like you? You could have married
that typhoid case a dozen times last winter if you'd crooked your little
finger! Why, the fellow was crazy about you. And he was richer than
Croesus. What queered it?" she demanded bluntly. "Did his mother hate
you?"
Like one fairly cramped with astonishment Rae Malgregor doubled up very
suddenly at the waist-line, and thrusting her neck oddly forward after
the manner of a startled crane, stood peering sharply round the corner
of the rocking-chair at Zillah Forsyth.
"Did his mother hate me?" she gasped. "Did--his--mother--hate--me? Well,
what do you think? With me who never even saw plumbing till I came down
here, setting out to explain to her with twenty tiled bathrooms how to
be hygienic though rich? Did his mother hate me? Well, what do you
think? With her who bore him, her who _bore_ him, mind you, kept
waiting down stairs in the hospital ante-room--half an hour every
day--on the raw edge of a rattan chair--waiting--worrying--all old and
gray and scared--while little young, perky, pink and white _me_ is
upstairs--brushing her own son's hair and washing her own son's
face--and altogether getting her own son ready to see his own mother!
And then me obliged to turn her out again in ten minutes, flip as you
please, for fear she'd stayed too long,--while I stay on the rest of the
night? _Did his mother hate me!"_
Stealthily as an assassin she crept around the corner of the
rocking-chair and grabbed Zillah Forsyth by her astonished linen
shoulder.
"Did his mother hate me?" she persisted mockingly. "Did his mother hate
me? Well rather! Is there any woman from here to Kamchatka who doesn't
hate us? Is there any woman from here to Kamchatka who doesn't look upon
a trained nurse as her natural born enemy? I don't blame 'em!" she added
chokingly. "Look at the impudent jobs we get sent out on! Quarantined
upstairs for weeks at a time with their inflammable, diphtheritic
bridegrooms--while they sit down stairs--brooding over their wedding
teaspoons! Hiked off indefinitely to Atlantic City with their gouty
bachelor uncles! Hearing their own innocent little sisters'
blood-curdling deathbed deliriums! Snatching their own new-born babies
away from their breasts and showing them, virgin-handed, how to nurse
them better! The impudence of it, I say! The disgusting, confounded
impudence! Doing things perfectly--flippantly--_right_--for twenty-five
dollars a week--and washing--that all the achin' love in the world don't
know how to do right--just for love!"
Furiously she began to jerk her victim's shoulder. "I tell you it's
awful, Zillah Forsyth!" she insisted. "I tell you I just won't stand
it!"
With muscles like steel wire Zillah Forsyth scrambled to her feet, and
pushed Rae Malgregor back against the bureau.
"For Heaven's sake, Rae, shut up!" she said. "What in Creation's the
matter with you to-day? I never saw you act so before!" With real
concern she stared into the girl's turbid eyes. "If you feel like that
about it, what in thunder did you go into nursing for?" she demanded not
unkindly.
Very slowly Helene Churchill rose from her lowly seat by her precious
book-case and came round and looked at Rae Malgregor rather oddly.
"Yes," faltered Helene Churchill. "What did you go into nursing for?"
The faintest possible taint of asperity was in her voice.
Quite dumbly for an instant Rae Malgregor's natural timidity stood
battling the almost fanatic professional fervor in Helene Churchill's
frankly open face, the raw, scientific passion, of very different
caliber, but no less intensity, hidden so craftily behind Zillah
Forsyth's plastic features. Then suddenly her own hands went clutching
back at the bureau for support, and all the flaming, raging red went
ebbing out of her cheeks, leaving her lips with hardly blood enough left
to work them.
"I went into nursing," she mumbled, "and it's God's own truth,--I went
into nursing because--because I thought the uniforms were so cute."
Furiously, the instant the words were gone from her mouth, she turned
and snarled at Zillah's hooting laughter.
"Well, I had to do something!" she attested. The defense was like a flat
blade slapping the air.
Desperately she turned to Helene Churchill's goading, faintly
supercilious smile, and her voice edged suddenly like a twisted sword.
"Well, the uniforms _are_ cute!" she parried. "They are! They are! I bet
you there's more than one girl standing high in the graduating class
to-day who never would have stuck out her first year's bossin' and slops
and worry and death--if she'd had to stick it out in the unimportant
looking clothes she came from home in! Even you, Helene Churchill, with
all your pious talk,--the day they put your coachman's son in as new
Interne and you got called down from the office for failing to stand
when Mr. Young Coachman came into the room, you bawled all night,--you
did,--and swore you'd chuck your whole job and go home the next day--if
it wasn't that you'd just had a life-size photo taken in full nursing
costume to send to your brother's chum at Yale! So there!"
With a gasp of ineffable satisfaction she turned from Helene Churchill.
"Sure the uniforms are cute!" she slashed back at Zillah
Forsyth. "That's the whole trouble with 'em. They're so
awfully--masqueradishly--cute! Sure, I could have got engaged to the
Typhoid Boy. It would have been as easy as robbing a babe! But lots of
girls, I notice, get engaged in their uniforms, feeding a patient
perfectly scientifically out of his own silver spoon, who don't seem
to stay engaged so especially long in their own street clothes, bungling
just plain naturally with their own knives and forks! Even you, Zillah
Forsyth," she hacked, "even you who trot round like the Lord's Anointed
in your pure white togs, you're just as Dutchy looking as anybody else,
come to put you in a red hat and a tan coat and a blue skirt!"
Mechanically she raised her hands to her head as though with some silly
thought of keeping the horrid pain in her temples from slipping to her
throat, her breast, her feet.
"Sure the uniforms are cute," she persisted a bit thickly. "Sure the
Typhoid Boy was crazy about me! He called me his 'Holy Chorus Girl,' I
heard him--raving in his sleep. Lord save us! What are we to any man but
just that?" she questioned hotly with renewed venom. "Parson, actor,
young sinner, old saint--I ask you frankly, girls, on your word of
honor, was there ever more than one man in ten went through your hands
who didn't turn out soft somewhere before you were through with him?
Mawking about your 'sweet eyes' while you're wrecking your optic nerves
trying to decipher the dose on a poison bottle! Mooning over your
wonderful likeness to the lovely young sister they--never had! Trying to
kiss your finger tips when you're struggling to brush their teeth!
Teasin' you to smoke cigarettes with 'em--when they know it would cost
you your job!"
Impishly, without any warning, she crooked her knee and pointed at one
homely square-toed shoe in a mincy dancing step. Hoydenishly she threw
out her arms and tried to gather Helene and Zillah both into their
compass.
"Oh, you Holy Chorus Girls!" she chuckled with maniacal delight.
"Everybody, all together, now! Kick your little kicks! Smile your little
smiles! Tinkle your little thermometers! Steady,--there!
One--two--three--One--two--three!"
Laughingly Zillah Forsyth slipped from the grasp. "Don't you dare 'holy'
me!" she threatened.
In real irritation Helene released herself. "I'm no chorus girl," she
said coldly.
With a little shrill scream of pain Rae Malgregor's hands went flying
back to her temples. Like a person giving orders in a great panic she
turned authoritatively to her two room-mates, her fingers all the while
boring frenziedly into her temples.
"Now, girls," she warned, "stand well back! If my head bursts, you know,
it's going to burst all to slivers and splinters--like a boiler!"
"Rae, you're crazy!" hooted Zillah.
"Just plain vulgar--looney," faltered Helene.
Both girls reached out simultaneously to push her aside.
Somewhere in the dusty, indifferent street a bird's note rang out in
one wild, delirious ecstasy of untrammeled springtime. To all intents
and purposes the sound might have been the one final signal that Rae
Malgregor's jangled nerves were waiting for.
"Oh, I _am_ crazy, am I?" she cried with a new, fierce joy. "Oh, I _am_
crazy, am I? Well, I'll go ask the Superintendent and see if I am! Oh,
surely they wouldn't try and make me graduate if I really was crazy!"
Madly she bolted for her bureau, and snatching her own motto down,
crumpled its face securely against her skirt and started for the door.
Just what the motto was no one but herself knew. Sprawling in
paint-brush hieroglyphics on a great flapping sheet of brown
wrapping-paper, the sentiment, whatever it was, had been nailed face
down to the wall for three tantalizing years.
"No you don't!" cried Zillah now, as she saw the mystery threatening so
meanly to escape her.
"No you don't!" cried Helene. "You've seen our mottoes--and now we're
going to see yours!"
Almost crazed with new terror Rae Malgregor went dodging to the
right,--to the left,--to the right again,--cleared the rocking-chair,--a
scuffle with padded hands,--climbed the trunk,--a race with padded
feet,--reached the door-handle at last, yanked the door open, and with
lungs and temper fairly bursting with momentum, shot down the
hall,--down some stairs,--down some more hall,--down some more stairs,
to the Superintendent's office where, with her precious motto still
clutched securely in one hand, she broke upon that dignitary's startled,
near-sighted vision like a young whirl-wind of linen and starch and
flapping brown paper. Breathlessly, without prelude or preamble, she
hurled her grievance into the older woman's grievance-dulled ears.
"Give me back my own face!" she demanded peremptorily. "Give me back my
own face, I say! And my own hands! I tell you I want my own hands!
Helene and Zillah say I'm insane! And I want to go home!"