Phebe, Her Profession Part 33

"No, thank you. I think not. This will make a very interesting and acceptable article, I am sure. But, before I go, would you mind telling me what you think of Browning?"

"The greatest poet of the century," Cicely replied glibly, mindful of local prejudice.

"And your favorite poem?" he asked insinuatingly.

Then at last Cicely floundered, for she was quite beyond her depth.

"I think the _Rubaiyat_ is by far the best," she said gravely, and her querist received the announcement in perfect good faith.

It was some weeks afterwards that Theodora, turning over her mail, came upon a marked copy of the _Intermountain_.

"What in the world is this?" she said in astonishment. "I never heard of the paper."

She opened it, and then she gasped. Upon the first page appeared a woodcut, evidently culled from the advertising department, and beneath it these headlines:

"Interview with Mrs. Theodora Farrington.

Alone with Her Tea-Kettle.

The Famous Young Author Works by Night.

The Inspiration of Genius by the Hob."

Theodora read it through, carefully, deliberately, down to the final statements in regard to Browning. She wondered at first. Then the light dawned upon her, as she came upon a carefully-turned phrase descriptive of "the little grey dog, the constant companion of his gifted mistress,"

and she looked up.

"Cis, you wretch!" she said.

But Cicely had been watching her face and, as she watched, her own dimples had grown deeper.

"Didn't you tell me I might?" she asked meekly.

"Yes," Theodora acknowledged; "yes, I did, and I don't know but it was justifiable. He must have been an innocent youth, Cis; but it's not so much worse than some of the tales told by men who have really seen me; only--don't do it again, dear. It might make me serious trouble."

"But, after all," she said to her husband, that night; "I am not so very sorry. They needn't make public property of us and our work. It is none of their affair, anyway; and Cicely has only done what I have wanted to do, and didn't quite dare. If more people had a deputy to be interviewed for them, it might put a stop to the literary columns in a good many minor papers."

And her husband agreed with her.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Down in Philadelphia, that fall, Phebe was having her first experience of bitter homesickness. She had always supposed herself immune from that dire disease, and, for some time, she had no idea what was the matter with her. In vain she tried to trace the cause of her complaint to malaria and to every known form of indigestion. She studied her symptoms carefully and tried to match them up, one by one, to the symptoms recorded in her text-books. At last, she was forced to the ign.o.ble conclusion that she was suffering from homesickness pure and simple, homesickness in one of its acutest forms. Her appet.i.te for her work declined in proportion to her appet.i.te for her food. She was listless, dull, and, it must be confessed, most deplorably cross. The fact of the matter was that the girl was pining for the broad lawns of The Savins, for the shabby red house, for her father and Hubert, even for Cicely and Cicely's dog Melchisedek.

Her work interested her. To her mind, there was a great charm in seeing the neat economy with which her body was constructed. She enjoyed the lectures keenly; but the clinics had proved to be her undoing. At the first one she had attended, she had ignominiously fainted away. There was a certain satisfaction in feeling that she had drawn upon herself at least one-half as much attention as the more legitimate object of the gathering; however, she was sternly resolved never to repeat the experience, and she accordingly became a walking a.r.s.enal of restoratives, whenever a clinic was on hand. In a nutsh.e.l.l, Phebe found theory far more attractive than practice. Surgery was a grand and helpful profession; but, under some circ.u.mstances, it was not neat, and Phebe must have neatness at any cost.

With her fellow-students she was quite unable to fraternize. For the most part, they were older than herself, a body of enthusiastic, earnest women who were ready to lay down their lives for their profession. Grave-eyed and intent, they went through the day's routine with a cheery patience under drudgery which showed the n.o.ble stuff of which they were made. They looked askance at Phebe's grumblings, her fluctuating enthusiasm, her hours of girlish frivolity and of pettish complaint. Among themselves, they a.n.a.lyzed her; but they were unable to cla.s.sify her. She was foreign to their ways of life and thought; in a word, they set her down as worldly and lacking in conviction.

On her side, Phebe detested them heartily. Golf was a sealed book to them; their skirts were p.r.o.ne to hang in dejected folds; their talk, even in their hours of relaxation, was of the shop shoppy. Down in her heart of hearts, she respected them; but in her naughty little head, she railed at them, not loudly, but long and unceasingly.

There were days when, utterly discouraged and out of conceit with herself and the world, she meditated writing to her father, telling him the whole truth and then taking the next train for home. Then she shut her teeth and went back to her work in a grim silence that warned her neighbors that she wished to be let alone. So far in her life, she had never given up anything she had undertaken, and she hated the idea of doing it now.

She would fight it out a little longer. Perhaps in time it would be a little less intolerable. Perhaps people always found it hard at first to adapt themselves fully to their professions. It was even within the limits of human possibility that, if she kept on long enough, she might come to the point of delighting in clinics, like Miss Caldwell who was fat and wore spectacles with tin bows and a cameo breastpin. Then she hunted up a dry spot in her pillow, and dreamed of The Savins, and Mac, and Quantuck, and waked up, and went to sleep again, and dreamed of hearing her father saying in the next room,--

"Poor Babe! I don't think she was ever meant to be a good doctor; but I don't see what on earth she really is good for, anyway."

The next afternoon, there were neither lectures nor clinics, and Phebe determined to go for a long walk. It was early November, and the hush and the haze of Indian summer lay over the park, as she halted on the bridge and stood looking down into the river beneath. Not a soul was in sight.

The noises of the city were hushed in the distance, and before her the broad reaches of the park stretched out and out under their mighty forest trees. In a way, the rolling slopes, the broad lawns and the trees reminded her of The Savins. She could imagine just how it looked at home, the green lawn heaped here and there with brown oak leaves, the golden glory of the hickories, the ma.s.ses of late chrysanthemums, red and white and pink and yellow, filling every sheltered nook and corner, above it all, the soft November haze which is neither rosy nor purple nor gold, but blended from them all, yet quieter far than any one of them.

All of a sudden Phebe's head went down upon her arms folded on the rail of the bridge and, secure in her solitude, she gave herself up to her woe.

"Miss McAlister?"

She started and pulled herself together abruptly.

"Are you in trouble?"

The voice was unknown, yet familiar, and she spun around to find herself face to face with Gifford Barrett.

"Where did you come from?" she asked, too much astonished at his appearing, too glad to look into a friendly pair of eyes to resent the sympathy written on his face.

"I came over here, for a few days, and I took the liberty of calling on you. The people at the house told me you had spoken of coming out here, so I came on the chance of finding you. But was something--?" He hesitated.

Phebe rubbed away her tears.

"Yes, something was," she answered, with an attempt at her usual briskness. "You caught me off my guard, Mr. Barrett. The fact is, I am desperately homesick."

"Then why don't you go home?" he asked prosaically, for he had learned, even in his slight experience at Quantuck, that it was not wise to take a sentimental tone in addressing Phebe.

"I can't. I came down here for a year, and I must stick it out."

"What's the use?"

"Because I never do give in. It would be babyish. Besides, I am going to be a doctor."

"I don't see why. It isn't in your line."

"I begin to think nothing is in my line," Phebe said forlornly.

"What else have you tried?"

"Nothing; but--I don't care about many things. I should like this, if it weren't for the clinics and the students and such things, and if I could be a little nearer home."

"When do you go home?"

"Christmas, if I live till then," Phebe laughed; but her mirth sounded rather lugubrious. Then she added half-involuntarily, "I wonder what you must think of me, Mr. Barrett. I'm not generally given to this kind of a scene."

"No matter," he said soothingly, much as he might have spoken to a child; "I am an old acquaintance, you know; and I never tell tales."

Suddenly Phebe laughed out blithely.