“You brush aside the non-essentials!” said another.
“It gives one a new outlook!”
“I hope to see it in print. It is so suggestive, dear doctor!”
Only one of the earnest horde made any sort of individual impression, and that was a slender, dark, elegant woman who approached him after every one else had gone.
“Doctor!” she said in a low, thrilling voice. “I feel that I must speak to you. Let me take you home in my car, won’t you?”
She was interesting, distinguished, and, he fancied, intelligent; so he was quite willing to follow her to her waiting motor-car and to seat himself beside her.
“Your lecture,” she began. “It’s such a startling idea to me—that of man being the victim in marriage.”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s not the conventional, romantic idea, of course.”
“Nor the true one,” she cried. “Oh, doctor, your brain may be right, but your heart is wrong! There is so much that you don’t seem to know—to understand! You don’t seem to realize how hideously we suffer—what we endure. I cannot pretend to be impersonal. I want to tell you the truth—a side of it that you don’t know. I want to tell you of one case. Then you must tell me what you think.”
She laid her hand on his arm and looked earnestly into his face.