Her Soul to Keep

By Marguerite Mooers Marshall

“You haven’t got a thermometer so you can’t take my temperature. It might give you quite a shock if you did.”

With all the fire of youth and passion, Nurse Joyce Randolph serves her great profession working the thankless night shift at a major New York City hospital, for an even more thankless patient—the spoiled daughter of chair of the hospital board of trustees. Joyce is more than up to the job, but one terrifying morning disaster strikes—Joyce’s patient dies from an overdose of morphine after she’s turned over the patient to a sloppy, selfish day nurse, who is pointing the accusing finger. Trustingly she turns to Dr. Warren Faulkner, the doctor on the case—and the man she plans to marry—to clear her name. But fearful that the scandal might prevent him from winning a plum job with a senior colleague, he begs Joyce to keep silent after she is fired and blackballed from nursing altogether. In shame and despair, she packs off to her roommate’s beach cottage on Long Island to try to heal her deep hurt and betrayal. There she meets Roger Kent, a former newspaper journalist whose bad heart couldn’t stand his grueling profession and who is now writing a novel. He helps Joyce learn to enjoy her first vacation, boating and fishing, swimming in the ocean, meeting the neighbors as they move in with the warming weather—though she can’t forget her deep love for her promising, brilliant surgeon. Then comes then day when Roger admits he is in love with Joyce, too, promising to honor her and her career, because “you can’t stop being yourself just because we’re in love. Even in love one has one’s soul to keep.” But when Warren comes back to her, swearing his abiding love and offering marriage, her choice is obvious. Isn’t it?

“Can a nurse really love a doctor for whose tragic mistake she has taken the blame? Read the answer in this charming and delightful romance. Readers of light fiction won’t want to miss this wholesome, refreshing love story.” Daily Nonpareil, February 1940