the
matter was that the girl was pining for the broad lawns of The Savins,
for the shabby red house, for her father and Hubert, even for Cicely and
Cicely's dog Melchisedek.

Her work interested her. To her mind, there was a great charm in seeing
the neat economy with which her body was constructed. She enjoyed the
lectures keenly; but the clinics had proved to be her undoing. At the
first one she had attended, she had ignominiously fainted away. There was
a certain satisfaction in feeling that she had drawn upon herself at
least one-half as much attention as the more legitimate object of the
gathering; however, she was sternly resolved never to repeat the
experience, and she accordingly became a walking arsenal of restoratives,
whenever a clinic was on hand. In a nutshell, Phebe found theory far more
attractive than practice. Surgery was a grand and helpful profession;
but, under some circumstances, it was not neat, and Phebe must have
neatness at any cost.

With her fellow-students she was quite unable to fraternize. For the most
part, they were older than herself, a body of enthusiastic, earnest women
who were ready to lay down their lives for their profession. Grave-eyed
and intent, they went through the day's routine with a cheery patience
under drudgery which showed the noble stuff of which they were made. They
looked askance at Phebe's grumblings, her fluctuating enthusiasm, her
hours of girlish frivolity and of pettish complaint. Among themselves,
they analyzed her; but they were unable to classify her. She was foreign
to their ways of life and thought; in a word, they set her down as
worldly and lacking in conviction.

On her side, Phebe detested them heartily. Golf was a sealed book to
them; their skirts were prone to hang in dejected folds; their talk, even
in their hours of relaxation, was of the shop shoppy. Down in her heart
of hearts, she respected them; but in her naughty little head, she railed
at them, not loudly, but long and unceasingly.

There were days when, utterly discouraged and out of conceit with herself
and the world, she meditated writing to her father, telling him the whole
truth and then taking the next train for home. Then she shut her teeth
and went back to her work in a grim silence that warned her neighbors
that she wished to be let alone. So far in her life, she had never given
up anything she had undertaken, and she hated the idea of doing it now.
She would fight it out a little