conservation and greater efficiency, being as up to date in their
charities as in everything else. Also, they brought guests and showed
them about; for when one was rich and had put one's money into
collections of sick and crippled children instead of old ivories and
first editions, it did not at all mean that one had not retained the
same pride of exhibiting.

There are a few rare natures who make collections for the sheer love of
the objects they collect, and if they can be persuaded to show them off
at all it is always with so much tenderness and sympathy that even the
feelings of a delicately wrought Buddha could not be bruised. But
there were none of these natures numbered among the trustees of Saint
Margaret's. And because it was purely a matter of charity and pride
with them, and because they never had any time left over from being
thorough and business-like to spend on the children themselves, they
never failed to leave a shaft of gloom behind them on Trustee Day. The
contagious ward always escaped by virtue of its own power of
self-defense; but the shaft started at the door of the surgical ward
and went widening along through the medical and the convalescent until
it reached the incurables at an angle of indefinite radiation. There
was a reason for this--as Margaret MacLean put it once in paraphrase:

"Children come and children go, but we stay on for ever."

Trustee Day was an abiding memory only with the incurables; which meant
that twelve times a year--at the end of every month--Ward C cried
itself to sleep.

Spring could not have begun the day better. She is never the
spendthrift that summer is, but once in a while she plunges recklessly