Isabel Herrick's life was one of deep earnestness and high aims. She was the daughter of a physician in an interior city. She had worked her way up from the bottom in the usual American fashion by plucky efforts constantly directed to one end, and was the head of the house of Herrick, which consisted of her young sister, a brother at college and her aged mother, now an invalid.
She had been one of the first three girls to enter the medical school, and she had been their shield and fortress in the storm which followed their entrance into the dissecting room. The battle was short but decisive. Her little head was lifted and her face white as she said:
"Men—I won't say gentlemen—I'm here for business, and I'm here to stay. If you're afraid of competition from a woman you'd better get out of the profession."
In the dead silence which followed a lank country fellow stepped out and raised his voice.
"She's right, and I'm ready to stand by her, and I'll see she's let alone."
Others shouted: "Of course she's right!" by which it appeared the disturbance was of the few and not the mass of students, a fact which Isabel inferred. She spoke a grateful word to the lanky student, and Dr. Sanborn found his wife right there.
There was little for Isabel to learn of the sordid and vicious side of men. She knew them for what they were, polygamous by instinct, insatiable as animals, and yet she had been treated on the whole with courteous—often too courteous—kindness. Her dainty color and her petite figure won over-gallant footway everywhere, though she often said:
"Gentlemen, I have studied my part. I know what I am doing and I ask only a fair field and no favors."
Thatcher and Sanborn had been her close companions in the stern, hard course they set themselves; each had said with vast resolution to the other: "I'm not to be left behind." And each had sworn to take no mediocre position. Thatcher had made apparently the least mark in the world, but he was writing a monograph which was expected to give important facts to the medical profession. He had written to Sanborn several times: "You have the advantage of association with the 'Little Corporal.'"
They called her "Little Corporal" among themselves. Her sternly sweet face had a suggestion of Napoleon in it, and then she ordered them about so naturally and led them so inevitably in everything she undertook.