"Perhaps Nature protected children from the danger of imitating by not making it their duty to imitate. And perhaps, as all parents are imperfect human beings, she may have thought it simple justice to children to confer upon them the right to be disobedient. At least, if there is an instinct to obey, it is backed up with an equal instinct not to obey; and the two seem to have been left to fight it out between themselves; and that perhaps is the great battle-field where incessant fighting goes on between parents and children. And at least disobedience has been of equal value with obedience in the making of human history, in the development of the race. For if children had simply obeyed their parents, if the young had been born merely to ape the old, there never would have been any human young and old. We should all still be apes, even if we had developed as far as that. You two ladies—of course with greatly modified features—might be throwing cocoanuts at each other on the tops of two rival palm-trees. Or—as the dutiful daughters of dutiful mothers—you might be taking afternoon naps in an oasis of dates—all because of that instinct of maternal imitation!"
He hurried out to the hat-rack, making his retreat at the top of his own high spirits, they following; and with one glove on he held out his hand to the mother of the sick boy:—
"I'll come in the morning to see how he is—and to see how his mother is. Now shake hands and say I have been a good doctor to you both."
The mother's reply showed that bitterness rankled in her, as she yielded her hand coldly:—
"Even if you have tried to destroy for me the intimate sacred bond between a mother and her child, I don't think you will be able to deny that my boy is a healthy and happy child because he is a child of a perfect marriage!" And she looked with secret and shaded import at the other mother.
As the doctor drove out of the yard her last words lingered—the healthy children of a perfect marriage. And the look the two mothers had exchanged! It was as though each had a sword in her eye and touched him with the point of it—hinting that he merited being run through. How often during these years he had encountered that same look from other mothers of the neighborhood!
"But if a wound like that could have been fatal," he reflected, "if a wound like that could have finished me, I should not have been here to save the life of her boy; he would have been dead this morning."
Then his mind under the rigor of long training passed to happier subjects. His success in the case of this child was one more triumph in his long list; it renewed his grip on power within him.
But for the necessity to provide for a people the services of general practitioner, Dr. Birney would have made a specialty of children's diseases. The happiest moment he experienced in his profession was a day such as this when he could announce the triumph of his skill and the saving of a young life. There was no sadder one than any day on which he walked out of the sick chamber and at the threshold met the gaunt ancient Presence, waiting to stalk in and take the final charge of the case given up by the vanquished physician. And when a few days later he sat in his buggy on the turnpike at the end of a procession—his healthy little patient stretched prostrate at the other end—he driving there as the public representative of a science that was ages old and that had gathered from all lands the wisdom of the best minds but was still impotent—on such a day he went down to his lowest defeat.