Certainly there was nothing romantic
discount ugg
boots about nursing. To her, it meant groans, delirium, death and
smells. The hospitals were filled with dirty, bewhiskered, verminous men who
smelled terribly and bore on their bodies wounds hideous enough to turn a
Christian’s stomach. The hospitals stank of gangrene, the odor assaulting her
nostrils long before the doors were reached, a sickish sweet smell that clung to
her hands and hair and haunted her in her dreams. Flies, mosquitoes and gnats
hovered in droning, singing swarms over the wards, tormenting the men to curses
and weak sobs; and
ugg boots discount
outlet Scarlett, scratching her own mosquito bites, swung palmetto
fans until her shoulders ached and she wished that all the men were
dead.
Melanie, however, did not seem to mind the smells, the wounds or
the nakedness, which Scarlett thought strange in one who was the most timorous
and modest of women. Sometimes when holding basins and instruments while Dr.
Meade cut out gangrened flesh, Melanie looked very white. And once, after such
an operation, Scarlett found her in the linen closet vomiting quietly into a
towel.
cheap uggs online But
as long as she was where the wounded could see her, she was gentle, sympathetic
and cheerful, and the men in the hospitals called her an angel of mercy.
Scarlett would have liked that title too, but it involved touching men crawling
with lice, running fingers down throats of unconscious patients to see if they
were choking on swallowed tobacco quids, bandaging stumps and picking maggots
out of festering flesh. No, she did not like nursing!
Perhaps it might
have been endurable if she had
uggs
discount been permitted to use her charms on the convalescent men,
for many of them were attractive and well born, but this she could not do in her
widowed state. The young ladies of the town, who were not permitted to nurse for
fear they would see sights unfit for virgin eyes, had the convalescent wards in
their charge. Unhampered by matrimony or widowhood, they made vast inroads on
the convalescents, and even the least attractive girls, Scarlett observed
gloomily, had no difficulty in getting engaged.
With
discount
uggs for women the exception of desperately ill and severely
wounded men, Scarlett’s was a completely feminized world and this irked her, for
she neither liked nor trusted her own sex and, worse still, was always bored by
it. But on three afternoons a week she had to attend sewing circles and
bandage-rolling committees of Melanie’s friends. The girls who had all known
Charles were very kind and attentive to her at these gatherings, especially
Fanny Elsing and Maybelle Merriwether, the daughters of the town dowagers. But
they
discount uggs for
women treated her deferentially, as if she were old and finished,
and their constant chatter of dances and beaux made her both envious of their
pleasures and resentful that her widowhood barred her from such activities. Why,
she was three times as attractive as Fanny and Maybelle! Oh, how unfair life
was! How unfair that everyone should think her heart was in the grave when it
wasn’t at all! It was in Virginia with Ashley!