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 longer.  Perhaps in time it would be a little less intolerable.  Perhaps people always found it hard at first to adapt themselves fully to their professions.  It was even within the limits of human possibility that, if she kept on long enough, she might come to the point of delighting in clinics, like Miss Caldwell who was fat and wore spectacles with tin bows and a cameo breastpin.  Then she hunted up a dry spot in her pillow, and dreamed of The Savins, and Mac, and Quantuck, and waked up, and went to sleep again, and dreamed of hearing her father saying in the next room,—­

“Poor Babe!  I don’t think she was ever meant to be a good doctor; but I don’t see what on earth she really is good for, anyway.”