Helen felt the emptiness to be extraordinary--unexpected; an emptiness between her and the sky; rooms mysteriously disfurnished; things that people said sounding hollow, as if the meaning of words had fallen away from beneath them; Saint Mary's at night became silent and dark, except for now and then a droning service without palaces or towers of sound. "To what end," reflected Thaddeus, "am I a student of human nature in the subtle sex? If she doesn't miss that antediluvian brute. I'm an addled egg." "We're dreadfully dull, Lady Rachel, aren't we?" said Helen. "Let's be Knights Hospitallers." "What do you mean?" "All the rest do is to scrape lint and read newspapers and potter. Why couldn't we enlist and be nurses?" "I dare say we could." "With white caps and big cuffs? Could we?" Mrs. Mavering wondered at Helen's influence over her. She had watched it grow, with a half-amused curiosity. She had thought to be the girl's guide and helper, and that this new interest would be her reward upon Thaddeus's theory of commissions. But she had seemed more and more to be following, not leading; as if, in the actual onward game of life, experience, instead of a lamp before, were a lamp behind, darkening the path with the shadow of ourselves. To remember only made one irresolute. It was necessary to be young, or else to forget--at any rate, to be valiant. But had she not had enough of excitement, adventure, the ragged seams of things, variety and burlesque, and been soul-sick through it all, and fled at last from its noise and passions? She shook her head, not so much at Helen as at the other side of her own inner argument. "Collars and cuffs, Lady Rachel! But you'd look beautiful!" "That isn't what people want in nurses." "It isn't? But it is! Why, if I were a man, and had you around looking like a remorseful queen who had just hung up her robe and crown on the hat-rack, and was trying to be humble with collars and cuffs, and all that, I'd get well if I were shot criss-cross. I'd say, 'This world is too fine to leave.'" "How should you know what you would do?" "Oh!" She hesitated, and drooped a little. "I think it was Gard said that." Then, with returned animation: "He was so funny, Lady Rachel. I asked him if he didn't think you were all that, and he only said, 'This world is too fine to leave; I think I'll stay quite a while.'" It did not all seem to Mrs. Mavering a direct argument to go hospitalling; only it seemed to fall in line with other questionings about the fallen curtain, and whether it might not again be raised. One might be content with a minor part.