"I know. For one honest nerve with a name, she shows you a dozen that are nameless; and the number of abnormalities that she contrives to find is simply appalling." "In other words, she has a spirit of genuine scientific research," said Miss Philips. "It does not say much for the examiners that such a woman should fail." A student who had been studying a brain in the corner of the room, looked up at this moment, tossing back a mass of short dark hair from her refined and intellectual face. "Poor examiners," she said. "Who would wish to stand in their shoes? Miss Maclean may be a good student, and she may have a spirit of genuine scientific research; but nobody fails for either of those reasons. Miss Maclean sees things very quickly, and she sees them in a sense exactly. She puts the nails in their right places, so to speak, and gives them a rap with the hammer; she fits in a great many more than there is any necessity for, but she does not drive them home. Then, when the examination comes, some of the most essential ones have dropped out, and have to be looked for all over again. It was a fatal mistake, too, to begin her Final work before she had passed her Intermediate. I don't know what subject Miss Maclean failed in, but I am not in the least surprised that she failed." Her audience heard the last sentence in a kind of nightmare; for Mona had entered the room, and was standing listening, a few yards behind the speaker. The girl turned round quickly, when she saw the conscious glances. "I did not know you were there, Miss Maclean," she said proudly, indignant with herself for blushing. Mona drew a stool up to the same table, and sat down. "It is I who ought to apologise, Miss Lascelles," she said, "for listening to remarks that were not intended for me; but I was so much interested that I did not stop to think. One so seldom gets the benefit of a perfectly frank diagnosis." "I don't know that it was perfectly frank. Some one was abusing the examiners, and I spoke in hot blood----" "It seems to me that statements made in hot blood are the only ones worth listening to--if we have a germ of poetry in us. Statements made in cold blood always prove to be truisms when you come to analyse them." "And one thing I said was not even true--I _was_ surprised when you failed." Mona was not listening. "What you said was extremely sensible," she said, "but so neatly put that one is instinctively on one's guard against it. It is a dreary metaphor--driving in nails; and, if it be a just one, it describes exactly my quarrel with medicine, from an examination point of view. Why does not one big nail involve a lot of little ones? Or rather, why may we not develop like trees, taking what conduces to our growth, and rejecting the rest? Why are we doomed to make pigeon-holes, and drive in nails?" "But the knowledge a doctor requires is in a sense unlike any other. He wants it, not for himself, but for other people."