At ten-thirty that same evening Madelaine was back in Hathaway Hall, Mount Hadley, perfect in an evening gown of gold satin and cobweb lace, dancing divinely with a clean-cut young fellow from Boston “Tech” who was going to Buenos Aires in August as an architect for the Argentine Government. The clean-cut young fellow decided Miss Theddon the cleverest girl he had ever met, as well as the most beautiful. She discussed architecture with him as though she had already qualified for an architect’s position herself. II The following evening Madelaine sat in her room and from her ivy-bordered window looked down upon the little town she was leaving on the morrow. Behind her the lights had been extinguished. Now and then a trio of white figures moved across the lawn or the Common below, in and out of the shadows made by the lordly elms. Happy laughter died on the summer night. Somewhere down the street piano keys were tinkling and the rich tenor of a man’s voice was softened by the distance. Madelaine was thinking of Bernie’s problem. Yet not altogether. She was also thinking of her own. Life was coming to her now as a responsibility. She owed much to her mother, far more to the world that had been so good to her, and the poor, perplexed, fog-groping men and women—especially young men and women—in it. What should be her life work? How should she try to repay that debt mounting with each passing month and year to overwhelming proportion? Marriage did not seem her end and aim. Not then! She had an intuition that marriage would come afterward, after she had paid the debt, or tried to pay it. What then? Always her well-ordered brain came back to Bernie. There must be many Bernies. Could she find her niche helping them? How? She tried drastic self-analysis. Then she relaxed and tried yielding herself unreservedly to instinct. Finally she thought of Bernie in terms of immediate help—guiding her through her Gethsemane—concretely. The function of nursing was but a step to conceiving herself the physician—of body as well as mind. The aptness of it struck her with peculiar force. A physician! Why not? Women were assailing all citadels of professions and business. Why not a physician? A great, warm, poignant self-assurance welled up within her. Why had she not thought of it before? In the ensuing ten moments her life course lay clear as an etching before her. The film between herself and the future had suddenly been swept aside. She was radiantly, unreasoningly happy. She wanted to sing with the ecstasy of the revelation. III She did sing. Whereupon she was so happy too that she wept—a little bit. What had taken possession of her? For the first time she felt blindly content to relax to intuitions and emotions.