"Truly; but something else would have to go to the wall; Turner, perhaps, or Browning, or Wagner.
'We have not wings, we cannot soar;
But we have feet to scale and climb.'"
"I don't know. Some of us appear to have discovered a pretty fair substitute for wings. But you know I am looking forward to your dissecting-room far more even than to the Zoological Gardens."
"You don't really mean to see the dissecting-room?"
"Of course I do. Why not?"
"Chiefly, I suppose, because you never can see it. No outsider can form any conception of what the dissecting-room really is. You would only be horrified at the ghastliness of it,—shocked that young girls can laugh over such work."
"Do they laugh?" said Doris, in an awestruck tone. She had pictured to herself heroic self-abnegation; but laughter!
"Of course they do, if there is anything to laugh at. We laughed a great deal at an Irish girl who could only remember the nerves of the arm by ligaturing them with different-coloured threads. When girls are doing crewel-work, or painting milking-stools, they are not incessantly thinking of the source of their materials. No more are we."
"But it is so different."
"Is it? I don't know. If it is, a merciful Providence shuts our eyes to the difference. It simply becomes our work, sacred or commonplace, according to our character and way of looking at things. There are minor disagreeables, of course; but what pursuit is without them? And if they are greater in practical anatomy than in other things, there is increased interest to make up for them."