She may have gone through a first-rate course, plenty of examinations, and we may find nothing inside. It may be the difference between a Nurse nursing, and a Nurse reading a book on Nursing. Unless it bear fruit, it is all gilding and veneering: the reality is not there, growing, growing every year. Every Nurse must grow. No Nurse can stand still. She must go forward or she will go backward every year. And how can a Certificate or public Register show this? Rather, she ought to have a moral “Clinical” Thermometer in herself. Our stature does not grow every year after we are “grown up.” Neither does it grow down. It is otherwise with our moral stature and our Nursing stature. We grow down, if we don’t grow up, every year. At the present time, when there are so many Associations, when periodicals and publicity are so much the fashion, when there is such a dragging of everything before the public, there is some danger of our forgetting that any true Nursing work must be quiet work--an individual work. Anything else is contrary to the whole realness of the work. _Where_ am _I_, the individual, in my inmost soul? _What_ am _I_, the inner woman called “I”? That is the question. This “I” must be quiet yet quick; quick without hurry; gentle without slowness, discreet without self-importance. “In quietness and in confidence must be her strength.” I must be trustworthy, to carry out directions intelligently and perfectly, _unseen_ as well as seen; “unto the Lord” _as well as_ unto men; no mere eye service. (How can this be if she is a mere Association Nurse, and not an individual Nurse?) I must have moral influence over my Patients. And I _can_ only have this by _being_ what I appear, especially now that everybody is educated, so that Patients become my keen critics and judges. My Patients are watching me. They know what my profession, my calling is: to devote myself to the good of the sick. They are asking themselves: does that Nurse act up to her profession? This is no supposition. It is a fact. It is a call to us, to each individual Nurse, to act up to her profession. We hear a good deal nowadays about Nursing being made a “profession.” Rather, is it not the question for _me_: _am I_ living up to my “profession”? But I must not crave for the Patient to be always recognising my services. On the contrary: the best service I can give is that the Patient shall scarcely be aware of any--shall recognise my presence most by recognising that he has _no_ wants. (Shakespeare tells me that to be “nurse like” is to be to the Patient-- So kind, so duteous, diligent, So tender over his occasions, true, So feat.) I must be thorough--a work, not a word--a Nurse, not a book, not an answer, not a certificate, not a mechanism, a mere piece of a mechanism or Association.