This long speech gave Lurida’s perfervid brain time to cool off a little.  She left the paper with the doctor, telling him she would come for it the next day, and went off to tell the result of this visit to her bosom friend, Miss Euthymia Tower.

XV

Dr. Butts calls on Euthymia.

The doctor was troubled in thinking over his interview with the young lady.  She was fully possessed with the idea that she had discovered the secret which had defied the most sagacious heads of the village.  It was of no use to oppose her while her mind was in an excited state.  But he felt it his duty to guard her against any possible results of indiscretion into which her eagerness and her theory of the equality, almost the identity, of the sexes might betray her.  Too much of the woman in a daughter of our race leads her to forget danger.  Too little of the woman prompts her to defy it.  Fortunately for this last class of women, they are not quite so likely to be perilously seductive as their more emphatically feminine sisters.

Dr. Butts had known Lurida and her friend from the days of their infancy.  He had watched the development of Lurida’s intelligence from its precocious nursery-life to the full vigor of its trained faculties.  He had looked with admiration on the childish beauty of Euthymia, and had seen her grow up to womanhood, every year making her more attractive.  He knew that if anything was to be done with his self-willed young scholar and friend, it would be more easily effected through the medium of Euthymia than by direct advice to the young lady herself.  So the thoughtful doctor made up his mind to have a good talk with Euthymia, and put her on her guard, if Lurida showed any tendency to forget the conventionalities in her eager pursuit of knowledge.

For the doctor’s horse and chaise to stop at the door of Miss Euthymia Tower’s parental home was an event strange enough to set all the tongues in the village going.  This was one of those families where illness was hardly looked for among the possibilities of life.  There were other families where a call from the doctor was hardly more thought of than a call from the baker.  But here he was a stranger, at least on his professional rounds, and when he asked for Miss Euthymia the servant, who knew his face well, stared as if he had held in his hand a warrant for her apprehension.

Euthymia did not keep the doctor waiting very long while she made ready to meet him.  One look at her glass to make sure that a lock had not run astray, or a ribbon got out of place, and her toilet for a morning call was finished.  Perhaps if Mr. Maurice Kirkwood had been announced, she might have taken a second look, but with the good middle-aged, married doctor one was enough for a young lady who had the gift of making all the dresses she wore look well, and had no occasion to treat her chamber like the laboratory where an actress compounds herself.