Her first intention had been to go back to her own town after her
graduation, and begin the practice of her profession among those who had
always known her, and whose scrutiny and criticism would be hardest to
bear, and therefore, as she fancied, the most useful to her in the
formation of character. But afterwards she relinquished her purpose in
favor of a design which she thought would be more useful to others: she
planned going to one of the great factory towns, and beginning practice
there, in company with an older physician, among the children of the
operatives. Pending the completion of this arrangement, which was waiting
upon the decision of the other lady, she had come to Jocelyn's with her
mother, and with Mrs. Maynard, who had arrived from the West, aimlessly
sick and unfriended, just as they were about leaving home. There was no
resource but to invite her with them, and Dr. Breen was finding her first
patient in this unexpected guest. She did not wholly regret the accident;
this, too, was useful work, though not that she would have chosen; but
her mother, after a fortnight, openly repined, and could not mention Mrs.
Maynard without some rebellious murmur. She was an old lady, who had once
kept a very vigilant conscience for herself; but after making her life
unhappy with it for some threescore years, she now applied it entirely to
the exasperation and condemnation of others. She especially devoted it to
fretting a New England girl's naturally morbid sense of duty in her
daughter, and keeping it in the irritation of perpetual self-question.
She had never actively opposed her studying medicine; that ambition had
harmonized very well with certain radical tendencies of her own, and it
was at least not marriage, which she had found tolerable only in its
modified form of widowhood; but at every step after the decisive step was
taken she was beset with misgivings lest Grace was not fully alive to the
grave responsibilities of her office, which she accumulated upon the girl
in proportion as she flung off all responsibilities of her own. She was