Love Stories — Story, Setting & Ideas

Nurses, Patients, and the 'Arrogance of Goodness'

The first story, 'Twenty-Two,' introduces a probationer who hopes to be 'plain Jane Brown'—a wish undercut by the narrator's aside that she 'could never be really plain.' Rinehart's tone is wry, but the hospital setting is not merely picturesque. When the Avenue Girl appears in a later story, the ward's response is not compassion but judgment: 'The ward flung its virtue at her like a weapon.' The phrase 'arrogance of goodness' recurs, and the probationer's defiance—filling a cup with ice, straightening pillows—becomes a quiet protest against 'a world that mutilated its children and turned them out to die.' The love stories here are shadowed by social cruelty, and Rinehart does not pretend that a kiss can erase it.

Silence and Gesture in the Ward

Rinehart gives significant space to characters who cannot speak. In one excerpt, a 'Dummy' communicates by gestures—miming a dog, a bandaged leg—while the Senior misreads him: 'He's trying to let me know that he knew her when she was a baby.' The Dummy then goes to the chapel, where the stained-glass window reads 'To the Memory of My Daughter Elizabeth'—a name that belonged to the Avenue Girl 'not so long ago.' The coincidence is noted but not explained. Rinehart uses the Dummy's silence to suggest knowledge that language cannot carry, and the chapel scene implies a grief that the ward's busy routines cannot address. The love story here is not spoken; it is stored in a scrub-closet and a memorial window.

Time Measured by Night Nurses and Fever Baths

Rinehart marks time in the hospital not by hours but by 'night nurses and day nurses; by rounds of the Staff; by visiting days; by medicines and temperatures and milk diets and fever baths.' This rhythm governs the characters' lives. Middleton, after his amputation, feels 'a strange singing in his ears' and invents pain to keep Jane Brown beside him. The interne, drying his hands, tells the probationer that for the Avenue Girl 'there doesn't seem to be any way back.' The stories are structured around these small, clinical intervals—a teaspoon of water, a pulse count, a shared towel—rather than grand declarations. Love, in Rinehart's hands, is something that happens in the margins of a shift schedule, between dressing changes and chapel bells.

Readers expecting conventional romantic plots may be surprised by the collection's clinical precision and its willingness to leave wounds unbandaged. The excerpts offer no guarantee of happy endings; the Avenue Girl 'did not ask' for life, and the Dummy's story remains a gesture. Approach these stories as character studies set in a world where love is tested not by rivals but by the 'general arrogance of goodness' and the slow, unglamorous work of care.

There’s a thread in those hospital stories—how the body’s wreckage lets tenderness slip through, unasked for. It keeps reminding me of something quieter in The Heart of Hyacinth — A Closer Reading, where love isn’t declared so much as discovered in the hush between verdicts. I wonder if that’s the whole of it, the not-asking. Strange how that stays with you.