Vigil in the Night by A. J. Cronin Page A

Manchester beginning to heal.
      Nevertheless, as she walked rapidly along Regent Street in the direction of the Black Cat, a quiet tea shop where Lucy had agreed to meet her, Anne’s expression was vaguely troubled. At the sight of her sister a swift light rushed into her face. She hastened forward with eager warmth to embrace her.
      “Well!” exclaimed Anne with a little gasp. “I’m so glad you’re here. I had an awful feeling that you might have to disappoint me again.”
      “It wasn’t my fault last time,” said Lucy, with a faint note of pettishness in her tone. “I simply had to take extra duty at the home.”
      “Of course, my dear,” Anne said soothingly.
      The two girls went into the Black Cat, ordered tea and toast, and took stock of each other across the narrow table.
      Lucy had changed somewhat since those days, not so long ago, when she had queened it over her small suburban domain at Muswell Hill. A shade harder, perhaps, her attitude toward the universe a trifle more defiant. She wore more make-up, and her clothes were decidedly smarter.
      “Have you heard from Joe?” Anne’s first question came tactfully.
      Lucy shook her head, then added, “Oh, I suppose I have—in a kind of way. He keeps asking me to go back to him. Really, Anne, it makes me mad even to think of it. Him, driving a bus, like a common chauffeur, after all we had or might have had. My lovely house and furniture gone, just because of his stupidity. I can’t forgive him. I won’t go back to him. I’m not cut out for marriage—not that kind, anyhow. I prefer to paddle my own canoe. And I’m pretty well off where I am.”
      There was a silence. Though Anne might have said much in extenuation of Joe, she held her peace. For Lucy, in these last few words, had raised the question that was really troubling her.
      “That’s something I must talk to you about, Lucy.” Anne spoke slowly, diffidently. “I’m sorry, dear, but I don’t—I don’t think you’re at all well off where you are.”
      “Don’t start that again,” said Lucy.
      “But I must, Lucy. I’m not happy about your being in that home. It hasn’t got too good a reputation.”
      “Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up. Just because the Rolgrave is a private home and not a beastly public institution, you’ve got your knife into it—and me, too. I tell you straight—when Joe let me down, I determined to do the best for myself I could. At the Rolgrave old Ma Sullivan pays her nurses three times the money you get, our uniforms are real silk, the food is marvelous, and we have absolutely classy patients. Why, all this week I’ve been specialing on Irene Dallas, the film star. You’ve heard of her, surely! She’s talking of taking me with her to California. I tell you there’s a fine chance for a nurse at the Rolgrave—in different ways. But what’s the use of talking. You have a grudge against private nursing homes.”
      “That’s not true, Lucy,” Anne answered steadily. “But I have my reasons for hating the Rolgrave.”
     
    CHAPTER 36
      She broke off, afraid of arousing further antagonism. Yet her very silence gave account of her anxiety. The Rolgrave, a luxury establishment in the heart of Mayfair—a locality from which the home mainly drew its clients—was one of the most notorious homes in London. Mrs. Sullivan, who owned the place, treated her nurses with a kind of prodigal liberality—she could, indeed, have obtained a staff on no other terms—but only the queer fish, the dubious characters, of the profession were to be found there. The home was on the black list, one of those places where shady operations were performed at a price, where wealth could command that kind of surgery forbidden by the law, where neurotics and overstrung women received the sedatives they craved and which an orthodox institution would have denied them. Since Anne had become aware of Lucy’s new post, she lived in perpetual dread of the