On her side, Phebe detested them heartily. Golf was a sealed book to them; their skirts were prone to hang in dejected folds; their talk, even in their hours of relaxation, was of the shop shoppy. Down in her heart of hearts, she respected them; but in her naughty little head, she railed at them, not loudly, but long and unceasingly.
There were days when, utterly discouraged and out of conceit with herself and the world, she meditated writing to her father, telling him the whole truth and then taking the next train for home. Then she shut her teeth and went back to her work in a grim silence that warned her neighbors that she wished to be let alone. So far in her life, she had never given up anything she had undertaken, and she hated the idea of doing it now. She would fight it out a little longer. Perhaps in time it would be a little less intolerable. Perhaps people always found it hard at first to adapt themselves fully to their professions. It was even within the limits of human possibility that, if she kept on long enough, she might come to the point of delighting in clinics, like Miss Caldwell who was fat and wore spectacles with tin bows and a cameo breastpin. Then she hunted up a dry spot in her pillow, and dreamed of The Savins, and Mac, and Quantuck, and waked up, and went to sleep again, and dreamed of hearing her father saying in the next room,—
"Poor Babe! I don't think she was ever meant to be a good doctor; but I don't see what on earth she really is good for, anyway."
The next afternoon, there were neither lectures nor clinics, and Phebe determined to go for a long walk. It was early November, and the hush and the haze of Indian summer lay over the park, as she halted on the bridge and stood looking down into the river beneath. Not a soul was in sight. The noises of the city were hushed in the distance, and before her the broad reaches of the park stretched out and out under their mighty forest trees. In a way, the rolling slopes, the broad lawns and the trees reminded her of The Savins. She could imagine just how it looked at home, the green lawn heaped here and there with brown oak leaves, the golden glory of the hickories, the masses of late chrysanthemums, red and white and pink and yellow, filling every sheltered nook and corner, above it all, the soft November haze which is neither rosy nor purple nor gold, but blended from them all, yet quieter far than any one of them.
All of a sudden Phebe's head went down upon her arms folded on the rail of the bridge and, secure in her solitude, she gave herself up to her woe.
"Miss McAlister?"
She started and pulled herself together abruptly.
"Are you in trouble?"
The voice was unknown, yet familiar, and she spun around to find herself face to face with Gifford Barrett.
"Where did you come from?" she asked, too much astonished at his appearing, too glad to look into a friendly pair of eyes to resent the sympathy written on his face.