“I don’t suppose Belle’s mother knew she was going to be a doctor when she gave her that name.”
My! how she turned and glared at me! Our eyes were about on a level. I don’t know whether I flinched or not; I have a recollection of a superhuman effort to glare back, but dare say I weakened. I remember her look seemed to say:
“You little upstart! who asked you to speak?” Then she announced:
“Well, it can’t go down ‘Minnie’—that’s settled. You will have to drop that and just keep the ‘Isabel.’”
“But I can’t drop it (Belle was almost crying)—it was my grandmother’s name; I’ll have to write home and ask my father first.”
“No time for that—the way you register to-day, that way your diploma has to read. We will have to see the Dean about this; but you may as well understand we will have no ‘i-e’ names here; we graduate women, not babies. I’ll see the Dean.”
Out she went. Belle and I looked at each other hopelessly. “If that is what women doctors are like, I don’t want to be one,” each of us thought, and knew the other’s thought.
Disheartened, disillusioned, tired, sleepy, hungry, far from home, our Regents’ certificates counting for nothing, this great unfriendly building, the dull sky, and we not knowing where we were going to stay that night—all this and more we felt as we looked at each other and tried to keep back the tears.
And then SHE came back and told us to go across the hall to the Dean.