So she went from place to place, each time descending both as regarded wages and mistress.

Barbara was good-natured and honest; but she had one fault--the great one of being totally unfit for all possible town situations.
Yet Society has, as we know, a wonderful faculty for making use of, assimilating and reconstructing everything, even the apparently most meaningless and useless, for its own purpose.

And the way it took, quickly enough, with poor Barbara was that she became the only thing in which she could be of any service in the town--namely, a nurse.
It was a sad time and a hard struggle while the shame lasted, almost enough to kill her; and after that, she never thought of returning to the Heimdal mountains again.
But things were to be still harder.
The various social claims, which an age of progress increasingly lays upon the lady of the house in the upper classes of society, asserted themselves here in the town by an ever increasing demand for nurses.
"The reason," as Dr.Schneibel explained, "was simply a law of Nature--you can't be a milch-cow and an intelligent human being at the same time.

The renovation of blood and nerves must be artificially conveyed from that class of society which stands nearer to Nature." And now the thing was to find an extra-healthy, thoroughly strong nurse for Consul-General Veyergang's two delicate, newly-arrived, little ones.
Dr.Schneibel had very thoughtfully kept a nurse in reserve for Mrs.
Veyergang--"a really remarkable specimen of the original healthiness in the common stock.

One might say--h'm, h'm--that if Mrs.Veyergang could not get to the mountains, the mountains were so courteous as to come to her.