"Brighter!" said the old doctor eyeing her approvingly. "But what will your people say?"
"They'll have to let me, Daddy-Doctor. Besides, everybody else is doing it, and you know that has great weight with Aunt Rhoda."
"It's a hard life, child! You never saw much of pain and suffering and horror."
"Well, it's time, then."
"But those men over there you would have to care for will not be like your grandfather and aunt. They will be dirty and bloody, and covered with filth and vermin."
"Well, what of that!"
"Could you stand it?"
"So you think I'm a butterfly, too, do you, Daddy-Doctor? Well, I want to prove to you that I'm not. I've been doing my best to get used to dirt and distress. I washed a little sick Italian baby yesterday and helped it's mother scrub her floor and make the house clean."
"The dickens you did!" beamed the doctor proudly. "I always knew you had a lot of grit. I guess you've got the right stuff in you. But say, if I help you you've got to tell me the real reason why you want to go, or else--nothing doing! Understand? I know you aren't like the rest, just wanting to get into the excitement and meet a lot of officers and have a good time so you can say afterward you were there. You aren't that kind of a girl. What's the real reason you want to go? Have you got somebody over there you're interested in?"
He looked at her keenly, with loving, anxious eyes as her father's friend who had known her from birth might look.
Ruth's face grew rosy, and her eyes dropped, but lifted again undaunted: "And if I have, Daddy-Doctor, is there anything wrong about that?"
The doctor frowned: "It isn't that fat chump of a Wainwright, is it? Because if it is I shan't lift my finger to help you go."
But Ruth's laugh rang out clear and free.
"Never! dear friend, never! Set your mind at rest about him," she finished, sobering down. "And if I care for someone, Daddy-Doctor, can't you trust me I'd pick out someone who was all right?"
"I suppose so!" grumbled the doctor only half satisfied, "but girls are so dreadfully blind."
"I think you'd like him," she hazarded, her cheeks growing pinker, "that is, you would if there is anybody," she corrected herself laughing. "But you see, it's a secret yet and maybe always will be. I'm not sure that he knows, and I'm not quite sure I know myself----"