"I wish you would not tell him that I am a medical student; I don't feel that I have done credit to my cloth. I should not like him to think medical women were muffs." "Oh, Mona, I do wish you would not be a medical woman, as you call it. Why don't you marry?" "'Nobody axed me, sir, she said.' At least nobody that I call anybody." "If you would go out to India, somebody would ask you every week of your life." "Thanks. Even that is not absolutely my ideal of blessedness." "But you don't want to be an old maid?" "That expression is never heard now outside the walls of a ladies' boarding-school," said Mona severely. "Oh, my dear, at the romantic age of seventeen you cannot even imagine how much I prize my liberty; how many plans I have in my head that no married woman could carry out. It seems to me that the unmarried woman is distinctly having her innings just now. She has all the advantages of being a woman, and most of the advantages of being a man. I don't see how it can last. Let her make hay while the sun shines. 'Ergreife die Gelegenheit! Sie kehret niemals wieder.'" "Well, I know I should be very disappointed, if I thought I should never have little children of my own." "O Maternity, what crimes are perpetrated in thy name! Mothering is woman's work without a doubt, but she does not need to have children of her own in order to do it. You dear little soul! Never mind me. I wish you as many as you will wish for yourself when the time comes, and a sweet little mother they will have!" CHAPTER VIII. BONS CAMARADES. "Nonsense!" "Fact, my dear fellow! I knew it before I knew her, or I simply should never have believed it It's an awful shock to one's theories, don't you know?--one's views of womanliness and all that sort of thing. I have thought about it till I am tired, and I can't make it out; but upon my soul, Dickinson, you may say what you like, the girl's a brick." "I'm quite sure of that already, and I'm sure she's clever enough for anything." "Oh--clever, yes! But clever women don't need to--but there! I can't go into all that again. I simply give the subject up. Don't mention it to me again." "But you know I am a staunch believer in women doctors. When my sister was so ill, the doctor at the station said she would be an invalid for life, and a staff surgeon who was passing through said the same. As a last resource I got a woman doctor to come a hundred miles to see her, and she brought Lena round in a few weeks. She knew her business, but--she was very different from Miss Maclean."