The Eleventh Virgin quotes

There was an agreeable excitement in listening to Sadie, excitement akin to that stomach-aching thrill when one was going to the circus.

But Sadie died from eating an Easter egg which had served as a parlor ornament for ten years.

It was made of sugar and by squinting through one end, June could see a cow and a milkmaid and green trees. Sadie’s death, June felt, was the result of delving too deeply into life’s secrets …

There was nothing to do but read and go to school and help with the housework. Reading, in itself, might have been a pleasure, save for the fact that it was always interrupted to help prepare meals, to set tables, to make beds.

Reading, moreover, seemed to make life even more of a problem.

For instance, there was the question of her soul and where she was before she was born and what would be come of her afterward.

The afternoon sun was filtering through the trees and the pavements were hot. There were some lilac bushes in the next yard and the fresh sweet smell swirled around her like a host of silent bees.

She was stung with beauty.

Suddenly she heard steps on the porch next door. She glanced up casually to find a pair of keen blue eyes looking at her. The house had been empty for a long while, and June knew that someone had moved in from down the street.

But really June didn’t hate it.

She loved to be bitten by fierce emotion.

This steady restlessness had suddenly become a torment but she would not have given it up now that she knew what it was.

“Jesus, Lover of my soul, Let me to Thy bosom fly—”

“Hypercrite! Singing songs like that when you’re in love with a married man.”

It seemed Adele had been reading her sister’s diary.

He had a cut across his forehead. At the moment of the blow, as she looked up at him, he smeared the blood from one eye and glared forth like one of the giants that Jack killed.

“Excuse me,” he said politely, “I can’t see.” And went on clubbing at the crowd to keep them from obstructing the patrol wagons which were gradually being filled.

The crowd continued to surge and howl.

“

Oh, I wish I could meet someone who would tempt me very insidiously to give up my virtue, persuading me to wickedness that was lovely just because it was wickedness!

”

Practically all the cases of short sentences that June knew of had an element of humor in them.

It is unfortunate, but true, that the more seriously devoted to a cause the victims were, the less comic the situation looked to them.

June had heard of another case, that of a young radical who was arrested for playing marbles on the Mall of Boston Common.

Do you want to get sick and messy? You know I won’t take care of females who haven’t any sense in that way. If you want to get gently exhilarated take another cocktail, the same kind you had before.”

“Lea’ me alone,” Billy mumbled with a straw between her lips.

“I’ve dreamt of these drinks for the last thirty days and I must take the train and go back to Washington again tonight. They’re going to have another demonstration tomorrow and I can’t get a check for those drawings until after they’re published.”

If you drank all the hot water you could when you were led tottering to the washroom at the end of the corridor and then clamored all the rest of the day for more hot water, you could get rid of the empty feeling.

The hunger wasn’t so bad, it was the dimness and the cold.

One of the Christian Scientists asked the guard for a Bible and Bibles were passed around to all of them.

But think of the world. Not your world, I suppose, but my world. If any of my friends ask ‘where’s June living now’ and I say, nonchalantly, ‘with three men over on Waverly Place’—what do you suppose they’ll think?

Not that I’m likely to answer them in any such way.

”

Another nurse said, “Can’t you see, Granny, that Miss Henreddy only wants to make you comfortable? She does it because she loves you.”

“Love be damned,” said Granny, loudly, stridently.

Her defiance was glorious, June thought, and she laughed joyfully as she put her hands under the armpits of the old lady and tried to persuade her to lie down. In the scuffle the bedclothes had been heaped in the middle of the bed.

There were two women dying in the ward, a woman of fifty and a girl of twenty-two. Mary Adams was slowly fading from the whiteness of the ward around her into a grey shadow on the long slim bed.

She had a grown son who came to visit her every evening when the wards were twilit and the evening toilets were completed.

He brought huge bunches of flowers which the head nurse vaguely disapproved of. “They are too flary.”

June was Margaret to her and anyone who made a noise was Willie. On one occasion, five nurses and a doctor were strapping a delirious, screaming patient into the bed next to her and consciousness of the tumult gradually sifted into her mind.

“Willie!” she piped up. “Don’t make so much noise. The neighbors will think we keep a disorderly house.”

June loved Willie, her cubby great-grand-child of ten. He came twice a week with bottles of orange juice and sat by her bedside. When he had been at her side for an hour, she realized that he was there, and chirped at him happily.

One evening June found her trying to sew with her large brass cross at the end of a rosary. “What are you trying to do, Granny?” She was swearing softly to herself now and then.

“Can’t you see I’m trying to make a buttonhole, you damn fool? The needle won’t go through. How can I keep warm without a buttonhole in my gowns?”

And then Lora McAlister was carried into the ward and all its sordid ugliness was lightened and relieved. Lora was twenty-eight, a widow, with auburn hair and brown eyes.

The worst of it all was, the husband of the girl was standing out in the hall all the time and he was just a young boy. He was crying terribly. And I have been, too, ever since.”

Nursing was like newspaper work in that it was impossible to suffer long over the tragedies which took place every day.

You were too close to them to have perspective. They happened too continuously. They weighed on you—gave you a still and subdued feeling but the very fact that you were continually busy left you no time to brood.

And the fact that it was another adventure for her, too, made it easier. Adventurous souls were rare, he argued. People liked to regard something that just happened to them, and which took an hour or so to happen, as an adventure.

Real adventurers were those that could enjoy a long drawn out adventure, one that entailed hard work and days of depression as well as those uplifted moments that come so seldom and are remembered ever after.

You have to get outside yourself June agreed—stand afar off and watch yourself running up and down the ward with glasses of eggnog, tying patients in bed, undressing filthy longshoremen, watch yourself being scolded at by head nurses and superintendents or nurses who always insisted …

“You should wait for some nice young man who will marry you and buy you a rubber plant and give you babies.”

“I don’t give a damn about marriage. And you only talk about nice young men and rubber plants because you really want me, even though you don’t want to marry me.”

“Better look out! You’ll persuade me yet,” he laughed at her. And then, “But you know you love babies. And if you had one I’d leave you.”

The other man at the table had a face like Puck. His mouth stretched from ear to ear when he smiled and his ears were pointed.

He grinned as though life were obscene.

He grinned at June now.

The other man at the table had a face like Puck. His mouth stretched from ear to ear when he smiled and his ears were pointed. He grinned as though life were obscene. He grinned at June now.

“I laugh that I may not weep,” he said. Then, “Rotten to be in love.”

There were three doors June could watch from where she sat. Each time she heard one open her heart gave a jump and each time she saw that the newcomer was not Dick, her heart sank lower.

I have never loved anyone before and I never shall again probably. It’s just as well. It’s a very wearing emotion. Won’t you be glad to be free of it?”

“I only wish that with every kiss I give you a little of my life would leave me. It would be a lovely way to die, providing I could arrange it with God that my death would coincide with the moment you stopped loving me.”

“You nasty little thing. And think what a nuisance it would be for me. How’d I raise enough money to pay for a funeral?