I am responsible for the hospital here, for the nursing in it, and for the Sisters who are sent out to private cases.

Year after year, one, two, and sometimes three of my best young nurses go away to these leper asylums in Rangoon and other places in the Far East.

It is not the stupid ones that go, the dull, devoted creatures who could do that one thing well, because it is perfectly mechanical and a mere question of prophylaxis, precaution, and routine--and charity.

Those that go always seem to be the best, the very nurses who are invaluable in all sorts of difficult cases from an operation to a typhoid fever; the most experienced, the cleverest, the most gifted! How can I be expected to keep up our standard if this goes on year after year?
It is outrageous! And the worst of it is that the "vocation" is catching! The clever ones catch it because they are the most sensitively organised, but not the good, simple, humdrum little women who would be far better at nursing lepers than at a case of appendicitis--and better in heaven than in a leper asylum, for that matter!' Monsignor Saracinesca listened in silence to this energetic tirade; but when the little white volcano was quiescent for a moment, he shook his head.

It was less an expression of disapproval than of doubt.
'It is manifestly impossible to send the least intelligent of the Sisters, if they do not offer to go,' he answered.