the child. She had grown to womanhood in
a cheap boarding school, attaining thereby a superficial education but
sufficient to enable her to pass the preliminary examinations necessary
to begin her studies in the medical college which was an outcast among
its kind and known among the profession as a "diploma mill." She
selected it because the course was easy and the tuition light, though
its equipment was a farce and its laboratory too meagre to deserve the
name; one of the commercial medical colleges turning out each year by
the hundreds, for a few dollars, illiterate graduates, totally unfitted
by temperament and education for a profession that calls for the highest
and best, sending them out in hordes like licensed murderers to
prescribe and operate among the trusting and the ignorant.

Dr. Harpe had framed her sheepskin and been duly photographed in her
cap and gown; then, after a short hospital experience, she had gone to
the little Nebraska town where perhaps the most forceful comment upon
the success of her career there was that the small steamer trunk, which
she was now opening, contained very comfortably both her summer and
winter wardrobe.

Her pose was an air of camaraderie, of blunt good-nature. Her
conspicuous walk was a swaggering stride, while in dress she affected
the masculine severity of some professional women. Her hair was the dull
red that is nearly brown and she wore it coiled in trying simplicity at
the back of her head. Her handsome eyes were the hazel that is
alternately brown and green and gray, sometimes an odd mixture of all
three. Ordinarily there was a suspicion of hardness in her face but
there was also upon occasions a kind of winsomeness, an unexpected
peeping out of a personality which was like the wraith of the child
which she once had been--a suggestion of girlish charm and spontaneity
utterly unlike her usual self.

This attractive phase of her personality was uppermost as she sought in
the trunk for something to wear, and a smile curved the corners of her
straight lips and brought out a faint cleft in her square chin, as she
inspected its contents.

She found what she wanted in a plain cloth skirt and a white tailored
waist with stiffly starched cuffs, and a man's sleeve links. When she
was dressed a man's linen waistcoat with a black silk watch-fob hanging
from the pocket added further to the unfeminine _tout ensemble_. She
liked the effect, and, as she thrust a scarf-pin in th