There seemed such a genuine ring in her voice, and she spoke with such solicitude for our welfare, that in the conversation I entirely forgot that after all she was only trying to bring us together again in order to prevent her own secret from being exposed.
At some moments she seemed the perfection of honesty and integrity, without the slightest affectation of interest or artificiality of manner, and it was this fresh complexity of her character that utterly baffled me. I could not determine whether, or not, she was in earnest.
"If it is really destiny I suppose that to try and resist it is quite futile," I remarked mechanically.
"Absolutely. Ethelwynn will become your wife, and you have all my good wishes for prosperity and happiness."
I thanked her, but pointed out that the matrimonial project was, as yet, immature.
"How foolish you are, Ralph!" she said. "You know very well that you'd marry her to-morrow if you could."
"Ah! if I could," I repeated wistfully. "Unfortunately my position is not yet sufficiently well assured to justify my marrying. Wedded poverty is never a pleasing prospect."
"But you have the world before you. I've heard Sir Bernard say so, times without number. He believes implicitly in you as a man who will rise to the head of your profession."
"I only hope that his anticipations may be realized," I said. "But I fear I'm no more brilliant than a hundred other men in the hospitals. It takes a smart man nowadays to boom himself into notoriety. As in literature and law, so in the medical profession, it isn't the clever man who rises to the top of the tree. More often it is a second-rate man, who has private influence, and has gauged the exact worth of self-advertisement. This is an age of reputations quickly made, and just as rapidly lost. In the professional world a new man rises with every moon."
"But that need not be so in your case," she pointed out. "With Sir Bernard as your chief, you are surely in an assured position."
Taking her into my confidence, I told her of my ideal of a snug country practice--one of those in which the assistant does the night-work and attends to the club people, while there is a circle of county people as patients. There are hundreds of such practices in England, where a doctor, although scarcely known outside his own district, is in a position which Harley Street, with all its turmoil of fashionable fads and fancies, envies as the elysium of what life should be. The village doctor of Little Perkington may be an ignorant old buffer; but his life, with its three days' hunting a week, its constant invitations to shoot over the best preserves, and its free fishing whenever in the humour, is a thousand times preferable to the silk-hatted, frock-coated existence of the fashionable physician.