“It is not so now.  I tell you we are all in a wretched condition.”

“You look it, mamma,” replied Evelyn, who perfectly understood when her mother was chaffing.

“But I think I don’t care so much for the lawyers,” Mrs. Mavick continued, with more air of conviction; “what I can’t stand are the doctors, the female doctors.  I’d rather have a female priest about me than a female doctor.”

This was not altogether banter, for there had been times in Carmen’s career when the externals of the Roman Church attracted her, and she wished she had an impersonal confidant, to whom she could confess—­well, not everything-and get absolution.  And she could make a kind of confidant of a sympathetic doctor.  But she went on: 

“To have a sharp woman prying into all my conditions and affairs!  No, I thank you.  Don’t you think so, McDonald?”

“They do say,” the governess admitted, “that women doctors haven’t as much consideration for women’s whims as men.”  And, after a moment, she continued: 

“But, for all that, women ought to understand about women better than men can, and be the best doctors for them.”

“So it seems to me,” said Evelyn, appealing to her mother.  “Don’t you remember that day you took me down to the infirmary in which you are interested, and how nice it was, nobody but women for doctors and nurses and all that?  Would you put that in charge of men?”

“Oh, you child!” cried Mrs. Mavick, turning to her daughter and patting her on the head.  “Of course there are exceptions.  But I’m not going to be one of the exceptions.  Ah, well, I suppose I am quite behind the age; but the conduct of my own sex does get on my nerves sometimes.”

Evelyn was silent.  She was often so when discussions arose.  They were apt to plunge her into deep thought.  To those who knew her history, guarded from close contact with anything but the world of ideas, it was very interesting to watch her mental attitude as she was day by day emerging into a knowledge of the actual world and encountering its crosscurrents.  To Philip, who was getting a good idea of what her education had been, an understanding promoted by his knowledge of the character and attainments of her governess, her mental processes, it may be safely said, opened a new world of thought.  Not that mental processes made much difference to a man in his condition, still, they had the effect of setting her personality still further apart from that of other women.  One day when they happened to be tete-a-tete in one of their frequent excursions—­a rare occasion—­Evelyn had said: 

“How strange it is that so many things that are self-evident nobody seems to see, and that there are so many things that are right that can’t be done.”

“That is the way the world is made,” Philip had replied.  She was frequently coming out with the sort of ideas and questions that are often proposed by bright children, whose thinking processes are not only fresh but undisturbed by the sophistries or concessions that experience has woven into the thinking of our race.  “Perhaps it hasn’t your faith in the abstract.”