122 THE BOOK OF THE CLASS OF NINETEEN-ELEVEN

 

 

as the Amazon shows the universality of her character. Then, too, whatever her name
was, she soon changed it by joining her fortunes to those of a horse-doctor. On first con-
sideration, this last event may seem to make an unsatisfactory climax, even an anti-climax
to her story—a lowly end which one would have thought incompatible with her heroic
proportions. In reality, as is plain after a little thought, nothing is further from the truth.
True to the classic demands made on her by her name and character, the Amazon was
fulfilling her high professional destiny. In her husband’s patients she must have felt
that she would have a wider area for her ministrations. Moreover, an Amazon must
necessarily be more at home with steeds than with ladies.

After our Freshman year Bryn Mawr knew this classic heroine no more, and with her
successors who were built on the ordinary scale, moral suasion took the place of brawn in
leading the ailing student back to health, My memories of the Amazon are vivid and
personal. Her pills were for all. My associations with her successors were for two years
mostly spectacular, except when (on rare occasions) connected with the administering of
gargles or mild doses of sticking plaster. I admired chiefly Miss Hartwig’s decorative
aspect—she would have made a lovely Gibson girl. I knew only from hearsay of her
artistic work in the bandage line. Among other nurses, I recall Miss Rhodes, who laughed
at my jokes and made a brief rest-cure at the Infirmary so happy that I failed to regret
“the quiz I left behind me.”

With Senior year, however, my nursing experience has grown vivid. I was taken
with poison-ivy in the late fall when the earth was bare and no baleful shrubs were visible
without the aid of a microscope. I did not have the microscope which is probably the
reason why I came on the shrub unawares. I have very vague ideas of the nurse in charge
of the ensuing plague because I could not see her. Her voice, however, was low and
soft—unaccompanied by mocking laughter. She and Dr. Branson were the only people
who did not laugh at my appearance.

On the principle of climax, I place my scarlet-fever nurse last. She was with me, not
through four years like 1911, but through five weeks, which is quite different and much
longer. With apologies to Delano for plagiarising let me “draw the veil, the memory
doth cut.” Only she had hair almost the same shade as Hellie’s, which was a little enlivening.

Rosatinp Mason.