"I'm not surprised."
There was a pause in which the elder doctor felt as if he saw the younger's uneasiness growing.
"You'll forgive me for saying it, Doctor Isaacson, but—but you don't understand women," said Hartley, at last. "You don't know how to take them."
"Perhaps not," Isaacson said, with an apparent simplicity that sounded like humility.
Doctor Hartley looked more at his ease. Some of his cool self-importance returned.
"No," he said. "Really! And I must say that—you'll forgive me?"
"Certainly."
"—that it has always seemed to me as if, in our walk of life, that was half the battle."
"Knowing how to take women?"
"Exactly."