"Do; it's extraordinary that every woman advocates matrimony for every man excepting her own son."
"She makes up for it by her efforts on behalf of her own daughter."
"Is that from experience?"
"Not in the sense you mean; I'm no catch to be chased myself; but I've seen enough to make you sick. The friends see the ceremonies—I see the sequels."
"'There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman's pulse.' But Yorick was an amateur! I should say a horrid profession, in one way; it can't leave a scrap of illusion. What's a complexion to a man who knows all that's going on underneath? I suppose when a girl gives a blush you see a sort of chart of her muscles and remember what produces it."
"I knew a physician who used to say he had never cared for any woman who hadn't a fatal disease," replied Kincaid; "how does that go with your theory? She was generally consumptive, I believe."
"Do you understand it?"
"Pity, I dare say, first. Doctors are men."
"Yes, I suppose they are; but somehow one doesn't think of them that way. Between the student and the doctor there's such an enormous gap. It's a stupid idea, but one feels that a doctor marries, as he goes to church on Sunday—because the performance is respectable and expected. Some professions don't make any difference to the man himself; you don't think of an engineer as being different from anybody else; but with Medicine——"
"It's true," said Kincaid, "that hardly anybody but a doctor can realise how a doctor feels; his friends don't know. The only writer who ever drew one was George Eliot."