“It’s been mine,” he said, “and you can make it yours.  Come, I want to talk with you about your future, because I have been thinking very seriously about my own.  I want to ask your advice and to give you mine.  I’ll commence by asking yours.  What do you think of me as a physician?  I know you are able to judge.”

She was flattered, in spite of herself.  There were long arrears of cool indifference to her own claims in that direction, which she might very well have resented; but she did not.  There was that flattery in his question which the junior in any vocation feels in the appeal of his senior; and there was the flattery which any woman feels in a man’s recourse to her judgment.  Still, she contrived to parry it with a little thrust.  “I don’t suppose the opinion of a mere homoeopathist can be of any value to a regular practitioner.”

He laughed.  “You have been a regular practitioner yourself for the last three weeks.  What do you think of my management of the case?”

“I have never abandoned my principles,” she began.

“Oh, I know all about that?  What do you think of me as a doctor?” he persisted.

“Of course I admire you.  Why do you ask me that?”

“Because I wished to know.  And because I wished to ask you something else.  You have been brought up in a city, and I have always lived here in the country, except the two years I was out with the army.  Do you think I should succeed if I pulled up here, and settled in Boston?”

“I have not lived in Boston,” she answered.  “My opinion wouldn’t be worth much on that point.”

“Yes, it would.  You know city people, and what they are.  I have seen a good deal of them in my practice at the hotels about here, and some of the ladies—­when they happened to feel more comfortable—­have advised me to come to Boston.”  His derision seemed to throw contempt on all her sex; but he turned to her, and asked again earnestly, “What do you think?  Some of the profession know me there.  When I left the school, some of the faculty urged me to try my chance in the city.”

She waited a moment before she answered.  “You know that I must respect your skill, and I believe that you could succeed anywhere.  I judge your fitness by my own deficiency.  The first time I saw you with Mrs. Maynard, I saw that you had everything that I hadn’t.  I saw that I was a failure, and why, and that it would be foolish for me to keep up the struggle.”

“Do you mean that you have given it up?” he demanded, with a triumph in which there was no sympathy.

“It has given me up.  I never liked it,—­I told you that before,—­and I never took it up from any ambitious motive.  It seemed a shame for me to be of no use in the world; and I hoped that I might do something in a way that seemed natural for women.  And I don’t give up because I’m unfit as a woman.  I might be a man, and still be impulsive and timid and nervous, and everything that I thought I was not.”