"Get over it? She's got over it already. She's as strong as a horse."
He turned from Ranny with a swing of his coat tails that but feebly expressed his decision and his impatience. He paused before the closed doorway for a final word.
"There's no earthly reason why she shouldn't nurse that baby."
"What's that, sir?" said Ranny, arrested.
"She must nurse it. It's better for her. It's better for the child. If I were her husband I'd insist on it—insist. If she tells you she can't do it, don't believe her."
"I say, I didn't know there'd been any trouble of that sort."
"That's all the trouble there's been," the doctor said. And he entered on a brief and popular exposition of the subject, from which Ranny gathered that Violet was flying in the face of that Providence that Nature was. Superbly and exceptionally endowed and fitted for her end, Violet had refused the task of nursing-mother.
"Why?"
The doctor shrugged his shoulders, implying that anything so abstruse as young Mrs. Ransome's reasons was beyond him.
He left Ranny struggling with the question: If it isn't weakness—what is it?