"No more do I, quite."
"You could not have brought her into Edinburgh?"
Mona shook her head. "Too late!" she said.
"It must have been dreadful to give her over, after all, to a man. I don't know how you could do it."
"That's because you don't know how kind he is, how he met me half-way, and made my task easy. It was the Kilwinnie doctor, you know, an elderly man." Mona sprang to her feet, and leaned against the mantelpiece. "At the risk of forfeiting your esteem for ever, Doris, I must record my formal testimony that the kindness I have met with at the hands of men-doctors is almost incredible. When I think how nice some of them are, I almost wonder that we women have any patients at all!"
"Nice!" said Doris quietly, but with concentrated scorn. "It's their trade to be nice. I never consulted a man-doctor in my life, and I never will; but if by any inconceivable chance I were compelled to, I would infinitely prefer a boor to a man who was nice!"
Mona laughed. "Dear old niceness," she said, "I won't have him abused. When all is said, he is so much more attractive than most of the virtues. And before we banish him from the conversation,—how do you like the Sahib?"
Doris's face brightened.
"He believes in women-doctors," she said.
"Ay, and in all things lovely and of good report." Mona was forgetting her resolution.