"It's been mine," he said, "and you can make it yours. Come, I want to talk with you about your future, because I have been thinking very seriously about my own. I want to ask your advice and to give you mine.
I'll commence by asking yours. What do you think of me as a physician?
I know you are able to judge."
She was flattered, in spite of herself. There were long arrears of cool indifference to her own claims in that direction, which she might very well have resented; but she did not. There was that flattery in his question which the junior in any vocation feels in the appeal of his senior; and there was the flattery which any woman feels in a man's recourse to her judgment. Still, she contrived to parry it with a little thrust. "I don't suppose the opinion of a mere homoeopathist can be of any value to a regular practitioner."
He laughed. "You have been a regular practitioner yourself for the last three weeks. What do you think of my management of the case?"
"I have never abandoned my principles," she began.
"Oh, I know all about that? What do you think of me as a doctor?" he persisted.
"Of course I admire you. Why do you ask me that?"
"Because I wished to know. And because I wished to ask you something else. You have been brought up in a city, and I have always lived here in the country, except the two years I was out with the army. Do you think I should succeed if I pulled up here, and settled in Boston?"
"I have not lived in Boston," she answered. "My opinion wouldn't be worth much on that point."
"Yes, it would. You know city people, and what they are. I have seen a good deal of them in my practice at the hotels about here, and some of the ladies--when they happened to feel more comfortable--have advised me to come to Boston." His derision seemed to throw contempt on all her sex; but he turned to her, and asked again earnestly, "What do you think?
Some of the profession know me there. When I left the school, some of the faculty urged me to try my chance in the city."
She waited a moment before she answered. "You know that I must respect your skill, and I believe that you could succeed anywhere. I judge your fitness by my own deficiency. The first time I saw you with Mrs.
Maynard, I saw that you had everything that I hadn't. I saw that I was a failure, and why, and that it would be foolish for me to keep up the struggle."
"Do you mean that you have given it up?" he demanded, with a triumph in which there was no sympathy.
"It has given me up. I never liked it,--I told you that before,--and I never took it up from any ambitious motive. It seemed a shame for me to be of no use in the world; and I hoped that I might do something in a way that seemed natural for women. And I don't give up because I'm unfit as a woman. I might be a man, and still be impulsive and timid and nervous, and everything that I thought I was not."
"Yes, you might be all that, and be a man; but you'd be an exceptional man, and I don't think you're an exceptional woman. If you've failed, it is n't your temperament that's to blame."
"I think it is. The wrong is somewhere in me individually. I know it is."
Dr. Mulbridge, walking beside her, with his hands clasped behind him, threw up his head and laughed. "Well, have it your own way, Miss Breen.
Only I don't agree with you. Why should you wish to spare your sex at your own expense? But that's the way with some ladies, I've noticed.
They approve of what women attempt because women attempt it, and they believe the attempt reflects honor on them. It's tremendous to think what men could accomplish for their sex, if they only hung together as women do. But they can't. They haven't the generosity."
"I think you don't understand me," said Grace, with a severity that amused him. "I wished to regard myself, in taking up this profession, entirely as I believed a man would have regarded himself."
"And were you able to do it?"
"No," she unintentionally replied to this unexpected question.
"Haw, haw, haw!" laughed Dr. Mulbridge at her helpless candor. "And are you sure that you give it up as a man would?"
"I don't know how you mean," she said, vexed and bewildered.
"Do you do it fairly and squarely because you believe that you're a failure, or because you partly feel that you have n't been fairly dealt with?"
"I believe that if Mrs. Maynard had had the same confidence in me that she would have had in any man I should not have failed. But every woman physician has a double disadvantage that I hadn't the strength to overcome,--her own inexperience and the distrust of other women."
"Well, whose fault is that?"
"Not the men's. It is the men alone who give women any chance. They are kind and generous and liberal-minded. I have no blame for them, and I have no patience with women who want to treat them as the enemies of women's advancement. Women can't move a step forwards without their sufferance and help. Dr. Mulbridge," she cried, "I wish to apologize for the hasty and silly words I used to you the day I came to ask you to consult with me. I ought to have been grateful to you for consenting at first, and when you took back your consent I ought to have considered your position. You were entirely right. We had no common ground to meet on, and I behaved like a petulant, foolish, vulgar girl!"
"No, no," he protested, laughing in recollection of the scene. "You were all right, and I was in a fix; and if your own fears had n't come to the rescue, I don't know how I should have got out of it. It would have been disgraceful, wouldn't it, to refuse a lady's. request. You don't know how near I was to giving way. I can tell you, now that it's all over. I had never seen a lady of our profession before," he added hastily, "and my curiosity was up. I always had my doubts about the thoroughness of women's study, and I should have liked to see where your training failed.
I must say I found it very good,--I've told you that. You wouldn't fail individually: you would fail because you are a woman."
"I don't believe that," said Grace.
"Well, then, because your patients are women. It's all one. What will you do?"
"I shall not do anything. I shall give it all up."
