. 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."

"But what shall you do then?"

"I--don't know."

"What are you going to be? A fashionable woman? Or are you going to
Europe, and settle down there with the other American failures? I've
heard about them,--in Rome and Florence and Paris. Are you going to
throw away the study you've put into this profession? You took it up
because you wanted to do good. Don't you want to do good any more? Has
the human race turned out unworthy?"

She cowered at this arraignment, in which she could not separate the
mocking from the justice. "What do you advise me to do? Do you think I
could ever succeed?"

"You could never succeed alone."

"Yes, I know that; I felt that from the first. But I have planned to
unite with a woman physician older than myself."

"And double your deficiency. Sit down here," he said; "I wish to
talk business." They had entered the border of the woods encompassing
Jocelyn's, and he painted to a stump, beside which lay the fallen tree.
She obeyed mechanically, and he remained standing near her, with one
foot lifted to the log; he leaned forward over her, and seemed to seize
a physical advantage in the posture. "From your own point of view, you
would have no right to give up your undertaking if there was a chance of
success in it. You would have no more right to give up than a woman who
had gon