But why not keep in France women so well-instructed? The reader no doubt has an inkling of the reason: the physicians are to be reckoned with, jealous guardians of their monopoly, already exasperated against the surgeons, apothecaries, and women, “nonentities,” who are meddling with the care of the children. They are masculine, these physicians, men to their finger-tips: to kill, or at any rate to physic one’s fellows, one must needs wear breeches. “The woman who meddles with our trade is a silly creature.” Women did meddle with it, nevertheless, out of devotion, and above all out of self-respect. And on this matter we must take note of ideas absolutely the reverse of those which prevail to-day. To women it would have appeared the deepest humiliation and the basest servitude to depend on men for the thousand intimate and special attentions which they so often found necessary in regard to their health. Undoubtedly they held that modesty is to some extent a relative term, and that “intentions” count for something in it. So they willingly permitted all sorts of friendly, spontaneous, personal familiarities, so long as they were in good taste; but even when sick and suffering they were determined to remain women; and the idea of surrendering their womanhood, of passing like cattle under the hands and eyes of a horse-doctor on the mere pretext that the modesty of a girl or a woman is a remnant of savagery, and that all stand-offishness in this respect appears almost an insult towards a practitioner, did not strike them as a matter of course; they repudiated it absolutely; and, moreover, the Roman, Greek, and Arabic ideas, then so fashionable, strengthened their resistance. So far from believing that a man had more rights because he was paid, or because his senses had become deadened by constant wear and tear, they regarded both these circumstances as adding to their humiliation and confusion. For their special maladies they had recourse to women only, and the very fact that in such cases physical pain is complicated with moral pain and weariness of soul, led women of the world, great ladies, to take up a work of charity of real delicacy and refinement, to devote themselves to a thorough study of this class of maladies, so that they might spare their sisters the unpleasantness of mercenary attentions. Nothing could be more gracious or more natural.