practice of being treated by men in female complaints. The fact which most struck her in all I told her was your amputating a breast; in this she actually triumphed. Her face became radiant with the intense satisfaction of the thing, for it proved to her by a fact what she wanted to believe, but could only accept intellectually from all my reasons—viz. the necessity of letting the midwife drop, and striking unflinchingly for the highest position. This one fact, worth to this sort of nature a host of arguments, gave her real faith in the physician. She opened freely her objections, or rather difficulties, and I met them one after another; and this difference I observed in the encounter with the cultivated European nature—when I gave her a reason she understood it and accepted it; it did not go in at one ear and out at the other as with more frivolous people; there is some soil or substance you can plant in in this stouter nature. As years ago with Lady Byron, so with this lady, it was of some use talking to her. She propounded, of course, foolish as well as serious ideas; thus she thought that women physicians should never marry; she also would be shocked to see me with a garland on my head dancing in a ball-*room, and she thought they should be devoted, like the sisters of charity, &c. I combated her idea of abnegation for a while, and put in a feeler to see if she could take in a higher notion; but finding it was impossible, I at once ceased the attempt, and allowed her to hold to her own highest idea, which I could see was tinged by her French nature. Of course it wearied me a little, and I wanted after a while to expand my lungs and breathe freely; but I certainly made a strong impression upon her. She thanked me and shook my hand again and again at parting, and said that she should not think of letting this be our last interview, and she should write to Madame de Noailles the very next day. She had asked me previously
