PAGE 3
A Case Of The Inner Imperative
by
“Well,” said Wilson, yawning, “you ‘re fortunate to be able to get up so much interest in your fellow-passengers. It is n’t once in a dozen journeys that I find anybody on a railroad train who does n’t strike me as being an entirely superfluous person.”
“Oh, well,” responded Adams good-naturedly, “you must remember that you are ten years older than I am, and that you are married and settled down, while I ‘m not.”
“It would be better for you if you were.”
“Yes, I know you are always preaching at me the advantages of double blessedness. But I ‘m not going to marry until I can’t help it. When the girl comes along who can make me forget everything in the world but herself, I ‘ll marry her, if she ‘ll have me.”
“Which she probably won’t, as things generally turn out in this world,” the other rejoined, smiling.
In the meantime Dr. Black was dipping here and there into the pages of her book, which had proved to be Mallock’s “Human Document,” more interested in its speculations concerning human nature and human nature’s twin problems of life and love than in its slender thread of story. Gradually her interludes of meditation grew longer and more frequent, until the book closed in her lap and she looked dreamily out of the window, her thoughts busy with herself, her past, and her future.
Should she ever marry? She thought it rather unlikely, but she had no definite intentions on either side of the question. She smiled as her thoughts travelled back to her first engagement, in her high-school days. She admitted to herself that she had been rather a gay lassie then, and had thought more about the boys than about her studies. She remembered, too, that she had been very popular among those same boys, and that that very popularity had doomed the engagement to a brief but exciting existence.
Then she recalled how she had passed, soon after this episode, under the influence of an enthusiastic teacher who had wakened her ambitions and led her to decide that she must make of herself something out of the usual and go out into the world and take part in its work. Then succeeded a period of such close application to her books that her parents and friends became alarmed lest she should injure herself. She ceased to smile upon her youthful admirers and treated them so curtly or talked to them so toploftily that she got the reputation of having become a man-hater.
“And I was n’t anything of the sort,” she said to herself, smiling and smelling her roses. “I simply did n’t like that kind of young men any more. They bored me to death.”
About that time, she remembered, she began to be much more interested in older men, men of more knowledge and achievement, and that they also began to show a liking for her. The teachers in the high school seemed to find it interesting to talk with her. The district attorney, who was their next door neighbor, seemed just as well satisfied, when he strolled across the lawns for a chat with her father, if he found Elizabeth alone on the veranda. The family physician encouraged the scientific trend of her reading, loaned her books by Maudsley and Darwin and Havelock Ellis, and often dropped in to talk with her about her studies, her reading, and her plans. He applauded and encouraged her first tentative notion that she would like to study medicine, and it was his arguments and influence that overcame her mother’s objections and persuaded her father that it would be worth while to spend upon her medical education the money it would demand. And, finally, came the doctor’s wife, asking to see her alone.
“I am sure you do not realize what you are doing,” the doctor’s wife said, “and so I want to put it frankly before you, as one woman to another. The truth is, my husband is falling in love with you; he is fascinated by you. And I want to ask you to save him from himself, and me from no end of heartache and misery, I ‘m fond of you, Elizabeth, you know that, and I ‘m proud of your abilities, and I want you to have a great success, but I don’t want you to trample down my happiness on your way. He and I have always been happy together until now; and it all rests with you, Elizabeth,–as a woman you know that–whether we keep our happiness and content with each other or go straight on into such disaster and wretchedness as you cannot imagine. And so I ‘ve put my pride in my pocket–it was no small thing to do, my girl,–and have come to ask you not to take my husband’s love away from me.”