The young woman went without haste, to show that a night assistant may do
such things out of friendship, but not because she must. She stopped at
the desk where the night nurse in charge of the rooms on that floor was
filling out records.
"Give me twelve private patients to look after instead of one nurse like
Carlotta Harrison!" she complained. "I've got to go to the trunk-room for
her at this hour, and it next door to the mortuary!"
As the first rays of the summer sun came through the window, shadowing the
fire-escape like a lattice on the wall of the little gray-walled room,
Carlotta sat up in her bed and lighted the candle on the stand. The night
assistant, who dreamed sometimes of fire, stood nervously by.
"Why don't you let me do it?" she asked irritably.
Carlotta did not reply at once. The candle was in her hand, and she was
staring at the letter.
"Because I want to do it myself," she said at last, and thrust the envelope
into the flame. It burned slowly, at first a thin blue flame tipped with
yellow, then, eating its way with a small fine crackling, a widening,
destroying blaze that left behind it black ash and destruction. The acrid
odor of burning filled the room. Not until it was consumed, and the black
ash fell into the saucer of the candlestick, did Carlotta speak again.
Then:-"If every fool of a woman who wrote a letter burnt it, there would be less
trouble in the world," she said, and lay back among her pillows.
The assistant said nothing. She was sleepy and irritated, and she had
crushed her best cap by letting the lid of Carlotta's trunk fall on her.
She went out of the room with disapproval in every line of her back.
"She burned it," she informed the night nurse at her desk. "A letter to a
man--one of her suitors, I suppose. The name was K. Le Moyne."
The deepening and broadening of Sidney's character had been very noticeable
in the last few months. She had gained in decision without becoming hard;
had learned to see things as they are, not through the rose mist of early
girlhood; and, far from being daunted, had developed a philosophy that had
for its basis God in His heaven and all well with the world.
But her new theory of acceptance did not comprehend everything. She was in
a state of wild revolt, for instance, as to Johnny Rosenfeld, and more
remotely but not less deeply concerned over Grace Irving. Soon she was to
learn of Tillie's predicament, and to take up the cudgels valiantly for
her.