Susie had been nearly a month in Edgeley, and a new faculty had developed in her--a faculty that lies dormant for a life long with many people, and that is impossible to others--the faculty of living in the country. She had never known what that was. Not only in town, in the midst of London, but in the strange, rigid, conventional, severely-regulated life of the great hospital, she had spent all the most important years of her life, and thought she knew no other way. Had she been interrogated on the subject, Susie would have said that the country might be very good for a change--it was, as everybody knew, the very place for convalescents; where people ought to be sent to get well: but for those who were well to start with, oh no! This she would have said in all good faith, in that serene unacquaintance with what she rejected, which is the panoply of the simple mind. But when she got to the country, almost the first morning Susie woke up in the quiet, in the clear air, and kind, mild sunshine which beamed out of the skies like a smile of God, and had no stony pavement to rebound from and turn into an oven--with a soft rapture such as all her life she had never known before. She had thought she liked the crowd, the stir, the perpetual call upon her, and what people called the life, which was nowhere so vigorous, so intent, so full of change, as in town. But in a moment she became aware that all this was a mistake, and that it was for the country she had been born. This had been a delightful revelation to Susie. And there had followed quickly another revelation, which never is unimportant in a young woman’s life, but which in her peculiar existence had been somehow eluded: and this was her own possession of that feminine power and influence of which books are full, but which Susie had not seen much of in ordinary life. Sometimes, indeed, there had happened cases in which a young doctor had somehow been transported beyond the line of his duties, by some one, perhaps a sister, most probably a young lady on probation, or one who was playing at nursing, as some will. And this had been at once wrong, which gave it piquancy as an incident, and amusing. But such incidents were very rare; people in the hospital being too busy to think of anything of the kind. Susie had been, without knowing, the object of one or two dawning enthusiasms of this description. In one case she had perhaps vaguely suspected the possibility: but Mrs. Sandford gave neither opportunity nor encouragement, and the thing had blown over.