“It has given me up. I never liked it,—I told you that before,—and I never took it up from any ambitious motive. It seemed a shame for me to be of no use in the world; and I hoped that I might do something in a way that seemed natural for women. And I don’t give up because I’m unfit as a woman. I might be a man, and still be impulsive and timid and nervous, and everything that I thought I was not.”
“Yes, you might be all that, and be a man; but you’d be an exceptional man, and I don’t think you’re an exceptional woman. If you’ve failed, it isn’t your temperament that’s to blame.”
“I think it is. The wrong is somewhere in me individually. I know it is.”
Dr. Mulbridge, walking beside her, with his hands clasped behind him, threw up his head and laughed. “Well, have it your own way, Miss Breen. Only I don’t agree with you. Why should you wish to spare your sex at your own expense? But that’s the way with some ladies, I’ve noticed. They approve of what women attempt because women attempt it, and they believe the attempt reflects honor on them. It’s tremendous to think what men could accomplish for their sex, if they only hung together as women do. But they can’t. They haven’t the generosity.”
“I think you don’t understand me,” said Grace, with a severity that amused him. “I wished to regard myself, in taking up this profession, entirely as I believed a man would have regarded himself.”
“And were you able to do it?”
“No,” she unintentionally replied to this unexpected question.
“Haw, haw, haw!” laughed Dr. Mulbridge at her helpless candor. “And are you sure that you give it up as a man would?”
“I don’t know how you mean,” she said, vexed and bewildered.
“Do you do it fairly and squarely because you believe that you’re a failure, or because you partly feel that you haven’t been fairly dealt with?”