"I guess I better not," she answered, setting her chair back against the
wall.

"I know what you mean. You mean about my laughing at women that try
to take men's places in the world. Well, I did laugh at them. They're
ridiculous. I don't want to marry this girl because she's a doctor.
That was the principal drawback, in my mind. But it does n't make any
difference, and wouldn't now, if she was a dozen doctors."

His mother let down the leaves of the table, and pushed it against the
wall, and he rose from the chair in which he was left sitting in the
middle of the room. "I presume," she said, with her back toward him, as
she straightened the table accurately against the mopboard, "that you
can let me have the little house at Grant's Corner."

"Why, mother!" he cried. "You don't suppose I should ever let you be
turned out of house and home? You can stay here as long as you live. But
it has n't come to that, yet. I don't know that she cares anything about
me. But there are chances, and there are signs. The chances are that
she won't have the courage to take up her plan of life again, and that
she'll consider any other that's pressed home upon her. And I take it
for a good sign that she's sent that fellow adrift. If her mind had n't
been set on some one else, she'd have taken him, in this broken-up state
of hers. Besides, she has formed the habit of doing what I say, and
there's a great deal in mere continuity of habit. It will be easier for
her to say yes than to say no; it would be very hard for her to say no."

While he eagerly pressed these arguments his mother listened stonily,
without apparent interest or sympathy. But at the end she asked, "How
are you going to support a wife? Your practice here won't do it. Has she
got anything?"

"She has property, I believe," replied her son. "She seems to have been
brought up in that way."

"She won't want to come and live here, then. She'll have notions of her
own. If she's like the rest of them, she'll never have you."

"If she were like the rest of them, I'd never have her. But she is n't.
As far as I'm concerned, it's nothing against her that she's studied
medicine. She did n't do it from vanity, or ambition, or any abnormal
love of it. She did it, so far so I can find out, because she wished
to do good that way. She's been a little notional, she's had her head
addled by women's talk, and she's in a queer freak; but it's only a
girl's freak after all: you can't say a