"Why, it was on an Easter Sunday--Oh, ages and ages ago," she faltered. "Why, I couldn't have been more than nine years old at the time." A trifle self-consciously she turned her face away from Zillah Forsyth's supercilious smile. "And I was coming home from a Sunday school festival in my best white muslin dress with a big pot of purple pansies in my hand," she hastened somewhat nervously to explain. "And just at the edge of the gutter there was a dreadful drunken man lying in the mud with a great crowd of cruel people teasing and tormenting him. And, because--because I couldn't think of anything else to do about it, I--I walked right up to the poor old creature,--scared as I could be--and--and I presented him with my pot of purple pansies. And everybody of course began to laugh, to scream, I mean, and shout with amusement. And I, of course, began to cry. And the old drunken man straightened up very oddly for an instant, with his battered hat in one hand and the pot of pansies in the other,--and he raised the pot of pansies very high, as though it had been a glass of rarest wine--and bowed to me as--reverently as though he had been toasting me at my father's table at some very grand dinner. And 'Inasmuch!' he said. Just that,--'Inasmuch!' So that's how I happened to go into nursing!" she finished as abruptly as she had begun. Like some wonderful phosphorescent manifestation her whole shining soul seemed to flare forth suddenly through her plain face. With honest perplexity Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work. "So that's--how you happened to go into nursing?" she quizzed impatiently. Her long, straight nose was all puckered tight with interrogation. Her dove-like eyes were fairly dilated with slow-dawning astonishment. "You--don't--mean?" she gasped. "You don't mean that--just for that--?" Incredulously she jumped to her feet and stood staring blankly into the city girl's strangely illuminated features. "Well, if I were a swell--like you!" she scoffed, "it would take a heap sight more than a drunken man munching pansies and rum and Bible-texts to--to jolt me out of my limousines and steam yachts and Adirondack bungalows!" Quite against all intention Helene Churchill laughed. She did not often laugh. Just for an instant her eyes and Zillah Forsyth's clashed together in the irremediable antagonism of caste,--the Plebeian's scornful impatience with the Aristocrat, equaled only by the Aristocrat's condescending patience with the Plebeian. It was no more than right that the Aristocrat should recover her self-possession first. "Never mind about your understanding. Zillah dear," she said softly. "Your hair is the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life!" Along Zillah Forsyth's ivory cheek an incongruous little flush of red began to show. With much more nonchalance than was really necessary she pointed towards her half-packed trunk.