adaptability a great deal better than you can these twenty years yet.
You will be growing happier these next few years at any rate, however
impossible life has seemed to you lately."

"I suppose there will be a great many obstacles," reflected Nan, with
an absence of her usual spirit.

"Obstacles! Yes," answered Dr. Leslie, vigorously. "Of course there
will be; it is climbing a long hill to try to study medicine or to
study anything else. And if you are going to fear obstacles you will
have a poor chance at success. There are just as many reasons as you
will stop to count up why you should not do your plain duty, but if
you are going to make anything of yourself you must go straight ahead,
taking it for granted that there will be opposition enough, but doing
what is right all the same. I suppose I have repeated to you fifty
times what old Friend Meadows told me years ago; he was a great
success at money-making, and once I asked him to give me some advice
about a piece of property. 'Friend Leslie,' says he, 'thy own opinion
is the best for thee; if thee asks ten people what to do, they will
tell thee ten things, and then thee doesn't know as much as when thee
set out,'" and Dr. Leslie, growing very much in earnest, reached
forward for the whip. "I want you to be a good woman, and I want you
to be all the use you can," he said. "It seems to me like stealing,
for men and women to live in the world and do nothing to make it
better. You have thought a great deal about this, and so have I, and
now we will do the best we can at making a good doctor of you. I don't
care whether people think it is a proper vocation for women or not. It
seems to me that it is more than proper for you, and God has given you
a fitness for it which it is a shame to waste. And if you ever
hesitate and regret what you have said, you won't have done yourself