in the East for the past five years…
“Six years,” she murmured. “Almost seven. Oh, excuse me, Miss Nyland. I didn’t see you come out of the mercantile.”
“Reading the article about yourself, are you, Sage?”
“Yes. My, it does seem strange, though. As if I’m somebody else!”
“Come across Friedrich’s editorial yet?”
“No, I—”
“Well, don’t take it too hard, dear.”
Miss Nyland whisked into the millinery shop, where a jaunty straw sun hat with a purple feather hung in the display window. The woman did love her bonnets, Sage remembered. She had worn them even when she taught school, and that was—my gracious!—thirteen years ago! Now Miss Nyland’s prize pupil at Grove School was grown up and wearing bonnets herself. Or should be. Absently Sage smoothed her free hand across her bare head.
She shrugged and went on down the street, her eyes glued to the typeset lines.
…Dr. West has opened her new medical practice at the corner of Maple Falls Lane and Cottage Road, next to the old McConnell homestead.
“Yes!” she exulted. She had her own house, her own reception parlor, her own consulting room.
…office hours are from…
Yes. Oh yes. She was a real doctor at last. And she had come home to keep the town she’d grown up in safe from disease and medical disasters.
She gave a little skip, stepped off the boardwalk and turned to the editorial. The warm June breeze rattled the open pages in front of her face, and she gripped them to keep them still without taking her eyes off the print. Halfway across the rutted road, she came to an abrupt stop.
“’Dried up old maid’?” she yelped. “’So plain a man would have to be blind to…’”
Oh!
She wasn’t “plain.” She was…well, tall. With a high forehead, a nose she’d always wished were a bit shorter, and a mass of hair the color of a muddy horse trough. “But my eyes are nice,” she said aloud.
Anyway, what difference did it make what she looked like? She was a good doctor. A very good doctor.
“I have studied for years!” she announced to the empty street.
A horse tied up in front of the hotel lifted its head and gazed at her with one large dark eye. “Well, I did,” she reiterated. The horse lowered its muzzle into the feed bag lashed to the rail.
Sage moved on across the road, settled herself in one of the rocking chairs in front of the mercantile and snapped open the newspaper again.
Well. Well! “Oh, for pity’s sake!”
Women should be wives and mothers…steadfast at the cradle, happy at the hearth.
“Cooks and nursemaids, is that it, Mr. Stryker? Laundresses and seamstresses and teachers, but not physicians?”
Why not?
She rocked furiously back and forth, then jumped to her feet, crumpled the sheets of newsprint into a ball and retraced her steps to the newspaper office as fast as she could. Before she cleared the doorway, words were tumbling past her lips.
“I thought you were my friend, Mr. Stryker! I thought you—”
Friedrich Stryker leaped from his desk chair and backed away.
“—liked me! Believed in me!”
The man looked stricken. “Well, I do, Miss Sage. I do.”
“But you don’t think I should be a doctor, is that it?”
“Yes, ahem. Exactly my thoughts. You’re a woman—”
She gave him no time to finish. “So what if I am female? I want to be a physician, not a nurse. I’ve wanted to be a physician ever since I was ten years old and my baby brother died. A nurse could not have saved him. A doctor would have known what to do.”
“Well, now, Miss Sage, that is partly—”
She pinned him with her oh-yes-I-can look. “You’re just like my professors at medical school. ‘Take up nursing,’ they advised. ‘Get married. Bear children.’”
“Miss Sage, don’t you aim to get married at all?”
“No, I do not,” she snapped. “First of all, nobody has asked to marry me. And even if someone does, I’ll turn him down. A doctor, especially a woman doctor, scarcely has time for her own needs, let alone those of a family.”
“Well now, that’s just my point.” His voice was steadier now.
Sage warmed to her subject. “There are women doctors all over this country—in Massachusetts and Indiana and Missouri and even Idaho. Just who do you think you are, telling us what we can and cannot do?”
The editor put a trembling hand to his face. “I—I’m a journalist, Miss, uh, Dr. West.”
“Why on earth would you write such claptrap?” she demanded. And after all those lemon drops…
A guilty look crossed Mr. Stryker’s face. “Newspapers have been selling pretty good lately,” he said in a tight voice. “That’s why.”
“Then this town is more backward than I thought.” She heaved the balled-up newspaper across the counter at him, gathered up her peach-sprigged muslin skirt in both hands and exited with as much decorum as she could manage.
The door did not close properly. She reversed direction, reopened it and this time made sure it shut with a satisfying slam.
Outside, she clenched her fists at her sides and began to count. By the time she reached sixty she had stopped shaking and regained power of speech. She walked on past the mercantile and Essie Ramsey’s millinery shop, her shoes hitting the boardwalk so hard her feet tingled. The purple-feathered hat beckoned. She rather fancied it. Was it too ostentatious for a country doctor?
A woman country doctor? She was the first female physician in the entire county. She had been the only woman enrolled at Western Reserve, and she had graduated at the top of her class. At this moment she felt she could do anything.
She marched into the millinery shop.
Ten minutes later she emerged with the purple-feathered hat securely pinned to her dark hair. It was a badge of sorts, she acknowledged. She was a doctor who could handle scalpels and forceps, and she was a female, and females wore bonnets! She would wear it each and every single day, with pride.
When she reached the end of the boardwalk, she continued along the well-worn path that led down to the river, her muslin skirt brushing the black-eyed Susans bordering the road. Four houses down, she turned onto Maple Falls Lane and headed for the trim white house that served as combination professional office and residence.
