As Elizabeth looked back to that time she owned to herself that, deeply moved as she had been by the appeal of the doctor's wife, her feelings had not all been of the same sort. In the depths of her soul there had been no little pride and exultation that the doctor was being chained to her chariot wheels, and she remembered quite distinctly that she had had a strong desire to keep him there. She herself had felt for him nothing more than cordial friendship and gratitude; but, nevertheless, there had been mingled with generous compassion some resentment against the wife, whose appeal she could not disregard.
Two years after that episode, while at home on her summer vacation, she met a lawyer, a man of high position, wide intellectual sympathies, and much culture, who promptly fell in love with her and proposed marriage. He interested her deeply and exercised over her a greater fascination than any man she had met before, and she gave her promise to be his wife, without thought as to its effect upon her future. But when she began to prepare for her return to the medical college he interposed an amazed veto. If she was to be his wife she must give up all expectation of a career separate from their home. She wavered and hesitated for two days, and then packed her trunk and returned to her studies. Thinking of him, as she gazed at the picturesque, wooded hills and valleys of Pennsylvania, she did not regret her action. She had never regretted it, she said to herself, but, nevertheless, she was sorry, she had always felt a distinct sense of loss, that he had passed out of her life.
Since then, the straight road to her medical degree and through her subsequent labors had been undisturbed by emotional storms. Twice she had refused offers of marriage, but they had come from men for whom she felt no more than the merest passing friendship. She had worked hard, and the farther she had progressed the more pleasure she had taken in her work and the more absorbed she had become in her prospects and ambitions. Looking into the future, for which she had planned and toward which she was working with all her powers, she said calmly to herself that it was more attractive to her than any other. And yet, would she be tempted to give up her ambitions and hopes of achievement if, for instance, she were to meet a man as well endowed in mind and heart as the hero of the book she had just been reading,--with such fineness of fibre and such power of loving? She would not face the question squarely, but told herself that she was not at all likely to meet such a paragon.