"Cis, you wretch!" she said.
But Cicely had been watching her face and, as she watched, her own dimples had grown deeper.
"Didn't you tell me I might?" she asked meekly.
"Yes," Theodora acknowledged; "yes, I did, and I don't know but it was justifiable. He must have been an innocent youth, Cis; but it's not so much worse than some of the tales told by men who have really seen me; only—don't do it again, dear. It might make me serious trouble."
"But, after all," she said to her husband, that night; "I am not so very sorry. They needn't make public property of us and our work. It is none of their affair, anyway; and Cicely has only done what I have wanted to do, and didn't quite dare. If more people had a deputy to be interviewed for them, it might put a stop to the literary columns in a good many minor papers."
And her husband agreed with her.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Down in Philadelphia, that fall, Phebe was having her first experience of bitter homesickness. She had always supposed herself immune from that dire disease, and, for some time, she had no idea what was the matter with her. In vain she tried to trace the cause of her complaint to malaria and to every known form of indigestion. She studied her symptoms carefully and tried to match them up, one by one, to the symptoms recorded in her text-books. At last, she was forced to the ignoble conclusion that she was suffering from homesickness pure and simple, homesickness in one of its acutest forms. Her appetite for her work declined in proportion to her appetite for her food. She was listless, dull, and, it must be confessed, most deplorably cross. The fact of the matter was that the girl was pining for the broad lawns of The Savins, for the shabby red house, for her father and Hubert, even for Cicely and Cicely's dog Melchisedek.
Her work interested her. To her mind, there was a great charm in seeing the neat economy with which her body was constructed. She enjoyed the lectures keenly; but the clinics had proved to be her undoing. At the first one she had attended, she had ignominiously fainted away. There was a certain satisfaction in feeling that she had drawn upon herself at least one-half as much attention as the more legitimate object of the gathering; however, she was sternly resolved never to repeat the experience, and she accordingly became a walking arsenal of restoratives, whenever a clinic was on hand. In a nutshell, Phebe found theory far more attractive than practice. Surgery was a grand and helpful profession; but, under some circumstances, it was not neat, and Phebe must have neatness at any cost.
With her fellow-students she was quite unable to fraternize. For the most part, they were older than herself, a body of enthusiastic, earnest women who were ready to lay down their lives for their profession. Grave-eyed and intent, they went through the day's routine with a cheery patience under drudgery which showed the noble stuff of which they were made. They looked askance at Phebe's grumblings, her fluctuating enthusiasm, her hours of girlish frivolity and of pettish complaint. Among themselves, they analyzed her; but they were unable to classify her. She was foreign to their ways of life and thought; in a word, they set her down as worldly and lacking in conviction.