“When we had been here a year, attending all the lectures--clinical medicine and surgery included--news came that one British school, Edinburgh, had shown symptoms of yielding to Continental civilization and relaxing monopoly. That turned me North directly. My mother is English: I wanted to be a British doctress, not a French. Cornelia had misgivings, and even condescended to cry over me. But I am a mule, and always was. Then that dear friend made terms with me: I must not break off my connection with the French school, she said. No; she had thought it well over; I must ask leave of the French professors to study in the North, and bring back notes about those distant Thulians. Says she, 'Your studies in that savage island will be allowed to go for something here, if you improve your time--and you will be sure to, sweetheart--that I may be always proud of you.' Dear Cornelia!” “Am I to believe all this?” said Vizard. “Can women be such true friends?” “What cannot women be? What! are you one of those who take us for a _clique?_ Don't you know more than half mankind are women?” “Alas!” “Alas for them!” said Rhoda, sharply. “Well, well,” said Vizard, putting on sudden humility, “don't let us quarrel. I hate quarreling--where I'm sure to get the worst. Ay, friendship is a fine thing, in men or women; a far nobler sentiment than love. You will not admit that, of course, being a woman.” “Oh, yes, I will,” said she. “Why, I have observed love attentively; and I pronounce it a fever of the mind. It disturbs the judgment and perverts the conscience. You side with the beloved, right or wrong. What personal degradation! I observe, too, that a grand passion is a grand misfortune: they are always in a storm of hope, fears, doubt, jealousy, rapture, rage, and the end deceit, or else satiety. Friendship is steady and peaceful; not much jealousy, no heart-burnings. It strengthens with time, and survives the small-pox and a wooden leg. It doubles our joys, and divides our grief, and lights and warms our lives with a steady flame. _Solem e mundo tollunt, qui tollunt amicitiam.”_ “Halloo!” cried Vizard. “What! you know Latin too?” “Why, of course--a smattering; or how could I read Pliny, and Celsus, and ever so much more rubbish that custom chucks down before the gates of knowledge, and says, 'There--before you go the right road, you ought to go the wrong; _it is usual._ Study now, with the reverence they don't deserve, the non-observers of antiquity.'” “Spare me the ancients, Miss Gale,” said Vizard, “and reveal me the girl of the period. When I was so ill-bred as to interrupt you, you had left France, crowned with laurels, and were just invading Britain.”