"No hours you can call your own; never daring to ask for the common things a man cares for. You see, women are mostly too jealous and small to understand a doctor's demands. They usually raise hell sooner or later. I had a friend whose wife used to look through the keyhole of his consulting-room door. A patient tripped over her once and it nearly cost my friend his practice. Doctors are only half human anyway, and women can't go halves with their husbands."
Dick laughed.
"Between a wife and a profession," he said, "give me the profession."
"Besides," Ledyard went on; "you get toughened and brutal; most of us drink, when we don't do something worse."
"You don't."
"How do you know?"
"I do know, and I'm sure you wouldn't let any one else say that about your associates; they're the noblest ever and you know it!"
"Well, we're bound and gagged, and that's a fact. We're not given much leeway. We are led up to a case and forced to carry out the rules. While we're doctors we can't be men."
Dick recalled that years later with a bitter sense of its truth!
"All the same, if the profession will have me, I'll have it and thank God. When I think of—well, of the little cuss I was, and of you—why, I tell you, I cannot get too soon into harness. I'd like to specialize, too. I've even gone so far as that."