omy, and I enjoy economy. I doubt if I do any general
practice for pay. There are so many young doctors that need the money
for practice more than I do. And perhaps taking it up as a living would
make me sort of hard and perfunctory. And there is so much to do in this
great New York among the unfortunate that a woman who knows medicine can
do better than any one else.

"Ah, me, I am happy in a way, or I expect to be. Everybody--it isn't
because I am a woman I say this--needs something to lean on now and
then. There isn't much to lean on in the college, nor in many of my
zealous and ambitious companions there. There is more faith in the poor
people down in the wards where I go. They are kind to each other, and
most of them, not all, believe in something. They, have that, at
any rate, in all their trials and poverty. Philip, don't despise the
invisible. I have got into the habit of going into a Catholic church
down there, when I am tired and discouraged, and getting the peace of
it. It is a sort of open door! You need not jump to the conclusion that
I am 'going over.' Maybe I am going back. I don't know. I have always
you know, been looking for something.

"I like to sit there in that dim quiet and think of things I can't think
of elsewhere. Do you think I am queer? Philip, all women are queer. They
haven't yet been explained. That is the reason why the novelists find
it next to impossible, with all the materials at hand, to make a good
woman--that is a woman. Do you know what it is to want what you don't
want? Longing is one thing and reason another.

"Perhaps I have depended too much on my reason. If you long to go to a
place where you will have peace, why should you let what you call your
reason stand in the way? Perhaps your reason is foolishness. You will
laugh a little at this, and say that I am tired. No. Only I am not so
sure of things as I used to be. Do you remember when we children used
to sit under that tree by the Deerfield, how confident I was that I
understood all about life, and my airs of superiority?

"Well, I don't know as much now. But there is one thing that has
survived and grown with the years, and that, Philip, is your dear
friendship."

What was it in this unassuming, but no doubt sufficiently conceited and
ambitious, young fellow that he should have the affection, the love, of
three such women?

Is affection as whimsically, as blindly distributed as wealth? It is the
experience of life tha