“Have you ever talked with her about studying medicine?”

“Indeed I have.  Oh, if she would only begin with me!  What good times we would have studying together!”

“I don’t doubt it.  Medicine is a very pleasant study.  But how do you think practice would be?  How would you like being called up to ride ten miles in a midnight snow-storm, just when one of your raging headaches was racking you?”

“Oh, but we could go into partnership, and Euthymia is n’t afraid of storms or anything else.  If she would only study medicine with me!”

“Well, what does she say to it?”

“She does n’t like the thought of it.  She does n’t believe in women doctors.  She thinks that now and then a woman may be fitted for it by nature, but she does n’t think there are many who are.  She gives me a good many reasons against their practising medicine, you know what most of them are, doctor,—­and ends by saying that the same woman who would be a poor sort of doctor would make a first-rate nurse; and that, she thinks, is a woman’s business, if her instinct carries her to the hospital or sick-chamber.  I can’t argue her ideas out of her.”

“Neither can I argue you out of your feeling about the matter; but I am disposed to agree with your friend, that you will often spoil a good nurse to make a poor doctor.  Doctors and side-saddles don’t seem to me to go together.  Riding habits would be awkward things for practitioners.  But come, we won’t have a controversy just now.  I am for giving women every chance for a good education, and if they think medicine is one of their proper callings let them try it.  I think they will find that they had better at least limit themselves to certain specialties, and always have an expert of the other sex to fall back upon.  The trouble is that they are so impressible and imaginative that they are at the mercy of all sorts of fancy systems.  You have only to see what kinds of instruction they very commonly flock to in order to guess whether they would be likely to prove sensible practitioners.  Charlatanism always hobbles on two crutches, the tattle of women, and the certificates of clergymen, and I am afraid that half the women doctors will be too much under both those influences.”

Lurida believed in Dr. Butts, who, to use the common language of the village, had “carried her through” a fever, brought on by over-excitement and exhausting study.  She took no offence at his reference to nursery gossip, which she had learned to hold cheap.  Nobody so despises the weaknesses of women as the champion of woman’s rights.  She accepted the doctor’s concession of a fair field and open trial of the fitness of her sex for medical practice, and did not trouble herself about his suggested limitations.  As to the imaginative tendencies of women, she knew too well the truth of the doctor’s remark relating to them to wish to contradict it.

“Be sure you let me have your paper in season for the next meeting, doctor,” she said; and in due season it came, and was of course approved for reading.