“I am sure you do not realize what you are doing,” the doctor’s wife said, “and so I want to put it frankly before you, as one woman to another.  The truth is, my husband is falling in love with you; he is fascinated by you.  And I want to ask you to save him from himself, and me from no end of heartache and misery, I ’m fond of you, Elizabeth, you know that, and I ’m proud of your abilities, and I want you to have a great success, but I don’t want you to trample down my happiness on your way.  He and I have always been happy together until now; and it all rests with you, Elizabeth,—­as a woman you know that—­whether we keep our happiness and content with each other or go straight on into such disaster and wretchedness as you cannot imagine.  And so I ’ve put my pride in my pocket—­it was no small thing to do, my girl,—­and have come to ask you not to take my husband’s love away from me.”

As Elizabeth looked back to that time she owned to herself that, deeply moved as she had been by the appeal of the doctor’s wife, her feelings had not all been of the same sort.  In the depths of her soul there had been no little pride and exultation that the doctor was being chained to her chariot wheels, and she remembered quite distinctly that she had had a strong desire to keep him there.  She herself had felt for him nothing more than cordial friendship and gratitude; but, nevertheless, there had been mingled with generous compassion some resentment against the wife, whose appeal she could not disregard.

Two years after that episode, while at home on her summer vacation, she met a lawyer, a man of high position, wide intellectual sympathies, and much culture, who promptly fell in love with her and proposed marriage.  He interested her deeply and exercised over her a greater fascination than any man she had met before, and she gave her promise to be his wife, without thought as to its effect upon her future.  But when she began to prepare for her return to the medical college he interposed an amazed veto.  If she was to be his wife she must give up all expectation of a career separate from their home.  She wavered and hesitated for two days, and then packed her trunk and returned to her studies.  Thinking of him, as she gazed at the picturesque, wooded hills and valleys of Pennsylvania, she did not regret her action.  She had never regretted it, she said to herself, but, nevertheless, she was sorry, she had always felt a distinct sense of loss, that he had passed out of her life.

Since then, the straight road to her medical degree and through her subsequent labors had been undisturbed by emotional storms.  Twice she had refused offers of marriage, but they had come from men for whom she felt no more than the merest passing friendship.  She had worked hard, and the farther she had progressed the more pleasure she had taken in her work and the more absorbed she had become in her prospects and ambitions.  Looking into the future, for which