swirl and ripple of her skirt, "like--I dunno what."

With her face turned from him Dr. Breen blushed, too; she was not yet so
used to her quality of physician that she could coldly bear the confusion
to which her being a doctor put men. She laughed a little to herself at
the helplessness of the driver, confronted probably for the first time
with a graduate of the New York homoeopathic school; but she believed
that she had reasons for taking herself seriously in every way, and she
had not entered upon this career without definite purposes. When she was
not yet out of her teens, she had an unhappy love affair, which was
always darkly referred to as a disappointment by people who knew of it at
the time. Though the particulars of the case do not directly concern this
story, it may be stated that the recreant lover afterwards married her
dearest girl-friend, whom he had first met in her company. It was cruel
enough, and the hurt went deep; but it neither crushed nor hardened her.
It benumbed her for a time; she sank out of sight; but when she returned
to the knowledge of the world she showed no mark of the blow except what
was thought a strange eccentricity in a girl such as she had been. The
world which had known her--it was that of an inland New England
city--heard of her definitely after several years as a student of
medicine in New York. Those who had more of her intimacy understood that
she had chosen this work with the intention of giving her life to it, in
the spirit in which other women enter convents, or go out to heathen
lands; but probably this conception had its exaggerations. What was
certain was that she was rich enough to have no need of her profession as
a means of support, and that its study had cost her more than the usual
suffering that it brings to persons of sensitive nerves. Some details
were almost insuperably repugnant; but in schooling herself to them she
believed that she was preparing to encounter anything in the application
of her science.