of giving
her life to it, in the spirit in which other women enter convents, or
go out to heathen lands; but probably this conception had its
exaggerations. What was certain was that she was rich enough to have
no need of her profession as a means of support, and that its study
had cost her more than the usual suffering that it brings to persons of
sensitive nerves. Some details were almost insuperably repugnant; but
in schooling herself to them she believed that she was preparing to
encounter anything in the application of her science.

Her first intention had been to go back to her own town after her
graduation, and begin the practice of her profession among those who had
always known her, and whose scrutiny and criticism would be hardest
to bear, and therefore, as she fancied, the most useful to her in the
formation of character. But afterwards she relinquished her purpose in
favor of a design which she thought would be more useful to others: she
planned going to one of the great factory towns, and beginning practice
there, in company with an older physician, among the children of the
operatives. Pending the completion of this arrangement, which was
waiting upon the decision of the other lady, she had come to Jocelyn's
with her mother, and with Mrs. Maynard, who had arrived from the West,
aimlessly sick and unfriended, just as they were about leaving home.
There was no resource but to invite her with them, and Dr. Breen was
finding her first patient in this unexpected guest. She did not wholly
regret the accident; this, too, was useful work, though not that she
would have chosen; but her mother, after a fortnight, openly repined,
and could not mention Mrs. Maynard without some rebellious murmur.
She was an old lady, who had once kept a very vigilant conscience for
herself; but after making her life unhappy with it for some threescore
years, she now applied it entirely to the exasperation and condemnation
of others. She especially devoted it to fretting a New England girl's
naturally morbid sense of duty in her daughter, and keeping it in the
irritation of perpetual self-question. She had never actively opposed
her studying medicine; that ambition had harmonized very well with
certain radical tendencies of her own, and it was at least not marriage,
which she had found tolerable only in its modified form of widowhood;
but at every step after the decisive step was taken she was beset with
misgivings lest Grace was not f