Free The Bostonians by Henry James Page B

on a visit to friends in the West, and would therefore naturally be a stranger to most of the Boston circle. Doctor Prance was looking at her—at Miss Birdseye—with little, sharp, fixed pupils; and the good lady wondered whether she were angry at having been induced to come up. She had a general impression that when genius was original its temper was high, and all this would be the case with Doctor Prance. She wanted to say to her that she could go down again if she liked; but even to Miss Birdseye’s unsophisticated mind this scarcely appeared, as regards a guest, an adequate formula of dismissal. She tried to bring the young Southerner out; she said to him that she presumed they would have some entertainment soon—Mrs. Farrinder could be interesting when she tried! And then she bethought herself to introduce him to Doctor Prance; it might serve as a reason for having brought her up. Moreover, it would do her good to break up her work now and then; she pursued her medical studies far into the night, and Miss Birdseye, who was nothing of a sleeper (Mary Prance, precisely, had wanted to treat her for it), had heard her, in the stillness of the small hours, with her open windows (she had fresh air on the brain), sharpening instruments (it was Miss Birdseye’s mild belief that she dissected), in a little physiological laboratory which she had set up in her back room, the room which, if she hadn’t been a doctor, might have been her “chamber,” and perhaps was, even with the dissecting, Miss Birdseye didn’t know! She explained her young friends to each other; a trifle incoherently, perhaps, and then went to stir up Mrs. Farrinder.
    Basil Ransom had already noticed Doctor Prance; he had not been at all bored, and had observed every one in the room, arriving at all sorts of ingenious inductions. The little medical lady struck him as a perfect example of the “Yankee female”—the figure which, in the unregenerate imagination of the children of the cotton-States, 1 was produced by the New England school-system, the Puritan code, the ungenial climate, the absence of chivalry. Spare, dry, hard, without a curve, an inflection or a grace, she seemed to ask no odds in the battle of life and to be prepared to give none. But Ransom could see that she was not an enthusiast, and after his contact with his cousin’s enthusiasm this was rather a relief to him. She looked like a boy, and not even like a good boy. It was evident that if she had been a boy, she would have “cut” school, to try private experiments in mechanics or to make researches in natural history. It was true that if she had been a boy she would have borne some relation to a girl, whereas Doctor Prance appeared to bear none whatever. Except her intelligent eye, she had no features to speak of. Ransom asked her if she were acquainted with the lioness, and on her staring at him, without response, explained that he meant the renowned Mrs. Farrinder.
    “Well, I don’t know as I ought to say that I’m acquainted with her; but I’ve heard her on the platform. I have paid my half-dollar,” the doctor added, with a certain grimness.
    “Well, did she convince you?” Ransom inquired.
    “Convince me of what, sir?”
    “That women are so superior to men.”
    “Oh, deary me!” said Doctor Prance, with a little impatient sigh; “I guess I know more about women than she does.”
    “And that isn’t your opinion, I hope,” said Ransom, laughing.
    “Men and women are all the same to me,” Doctor Prance remarked. “I don’t see any difference. There is room for improvement in both sexes. Neither of them is up to the standard.” And on Ransom’s asking her what the standard appeared to her to be, she said, “Well, they ought to live better; that’s what they ought to do.” And she went on to declare, further, that she thought they all talked too much. This had so long been Ransom’s conviction that his heart quite warmed to Doctor Prance, and he paid