She listened to the talk between Doctor McCall and Miss Muller in a language she had never learned.  Maria’s share of it was largely made up of headlong dives into Spencer and Darwin, with reminiscences of The Dial, while Doctor McCall’s was anchored fast down to facts; but it was all alive, suggestive, brilliant.  They were young.  They were drinking life and love with full cups.  She (looking over at the bald head and spectacled eyes) had gone straight out of childhood into middle age and respectability.

The breakfast was over at last.  Miss Muller followed Doctor McCall into the shop, where he fell to turning over the old books, and then to the garden.  What was the use of a stage properly set if the drama would not begin?

“Pray do not worry any longer with that old bush,” as he went back to Peter’s rose.  “It is not a trait of yours to be persistent about trifles.  Or stay:  give me a bud for my hair.”

“Not these!” sharply, holding her hand.  “I could not see one of these roses on any woman’s head.”

She smiled, very well pleased:  “You perceive some subtle connection between me and the flower?”

“Nothing of the sort.  There are some, planted, I suppose, by that little girl, which will be more becoming to your face.”

“You are repelled by ‘the little girl,’ I see, John.  I always told you your instincts were magnetic.  That type of woman is antipathetic to you.”

He laughed:  “I have no instincts, hardly ideas, about either roses or types of women.  If I avoided Miss Vogdes, it was because her name recalled one of the old hard experiences of my boyhood.  The girl herself is harmless enough, no doubt.”

“And the rose?”

“The rose?  Why, we have no time to waste in such talk as this.  You have not yet told me how you managed to get your profession.  When I last saw you you had set all the old professors in the university at defiance.  Did you carry lectures and cliniques by strategy or assault?  You have good fighting qualities, Maria.”

She would rather not have gone over her battle with the doctors just then:  she would rather he had talked of her “magnetic instincts,” her hair, her eyes—­anything else than her fighting qualities.  But she told him.  There was an inexplicable delight to her in telling him anything—­even the time of day.  Was he not a pioneer, a captain among men, a seer in the realms of thought, keeping step with her in all her high imaginings?  Ordinary people, it is true, set McCall down as an ordinary fellow, genial and hearty—­not a very skillful physician, perhaps, but a shrewd farmer, and the best judge of mules or peaches in Kent county.  Maria, however, saw him with the soul’s eye.