“I am very sorry,” said Grace coldly. “I should dislike being controlled myself, and I should dislike still more to control others.”
“You’re doing it now!” cried Miss Gleason, with delight. “I could not do a thing to resist your putting me down! Of course you don’t know that you’re doing it; it’s purely involuntary. And you wouldn’t know that he was dominating you. And he wouldn’t.”
Very probably Dr. Mulbridge would not have recognized himself in the character of all-compelling lady’s-novel hero, which Miss Gleason imagined for him. Life presented itself rather simply to him, as it does to most men, and he easily dismissed its subtler problems from a mind preoccupied with active cares. As far as Grace was concerned, she had certainly roused in him an unusual curiosity; nothing less than her homœopathy would have made him withdraw his consent to a consultation with her, and his fear had been that in his refusal she should escape from his desire to know more about her, her motives, her purposes. He had accepted without scruple the sacrifice of pride she had made to him; but he had known how to appreciate her scientific training, which he found as respectable as that of any clever, young man of their profession. He praised, in his way, the perfection with which she interpreted his actions and intentions in regard to the patient. “If there were such nurses as you, Miss Breen, there would be very little need of doctors,” he said, with a sort of interogative fashion of laughing peculiar to him.
“I thought of being a nurse once;” she answered. “Perhaps I may still be one. The scientific training won’t be lost.”
“Oh, no? It’s a pity that more of them haven’t it. But I suppose they think nursing is rather too humble an ambition.”
“I don’t think it so,” said Grace briefly.
“Then you didn’t care for medical distinction.”
“No.”
He looked at her quizzically, as if this were much droller than if she had cared. “I don’t understand why you should have gone into it. You told me, I think, that it was repugnant to you; and it’s hard work for a woman, and very uncertain work for anyone. You must have had a tremendous desire to benefit your race.”
His characterization of her motive was so distasteful that she made no reply, and left him to his conjectures, in which he did not appear unhappy. “How do you find Mrs. Maynard to-day?” she asked.