"And so you are going to be a doctor?" he said once, I don't know at which meeting. How can I tell--there were so many!
"Well, I am a doctor too," he said. "And perhaps that is the reason I loathe the thought of any woman meddling in that profession."
"I don't particularly like it myself," I told him. "It was necessary for me to be something, and I had enthusiasm enough to begin with; but----"
"What is your sister?" he asked me suddenly; it took me by surprise, but I told him, with blushes, that she was a doctor too.
"I wonder what my brother will say to that?" he pondered. "You look surprised. Is there any reason I should not have a brother? He is a doctor like myself, and shares my prejudices."
"Those prejudices don't affect my sister," I took courage to remark.
"They should. No decent woman can afford to despise the prejudices of a decent man. The place of a young and beautiful woman is not----"
"I did not tell you she was young or beautiful. I--she--we are thirty years old; and 'pretty,' 'interesting,' 'fine-looking,' are the most complimentary epithets which have ever been applied to us."
"We don't all see with the same eyes," the man said.
It was on our last evening that I sate on a chair in the hotel gardens; he came and smoked his cigar beside me.
"And you don't purpose to tell me where you go?"
I shook my head. How can I have him coming to my place with that story of my sister--?
"So here, for ever, we say good-bye. I go back to my practice in Sydney; and you----?"
The band was playing on the pier; the strains of that pretty thing Hayden Coffin sings in _The Greek Slave_ came sorrowfully to us across the sea and the sand. The people in their smart seaside costumes went trooping past.
"Not a face I know in all these thousands," he said, and waved the hand which held the cigar to include pier, parade, beach. "Not a face known to you. Under such circumstances two people get to know each other in four days as well as in years of ordinary intercourse. When I say good-bye to you, I shall feel that I am parting with a very dear friend. A friend I shall hardly know how to replace, or even to live without. After four days! Absurd, is it not?"
"May I tell you about my brother?" This was after a long pause, during which I had been inwardly shrinking from the dreary struggle before me, and wishing--wishing--wishing that life was all holiday. "He is my twin brother. Curious, isn't it? You don't think so? Oh, of course we know there are twin brothers as well as twin sisters; but--. Still, let me tell you a rather curious fact with regard to him.