The House of Doctor Edwards

CONSTANCE Sedgwick, M.D., aged twenty-six, was staring at herself critically in the long mirror. As a young doctor of medicine, with a degree for which she had worked hard and long, she prided herself on being objective. She was looking at herself, so she said, as she had been taught to look at a bacteriological culture under the lens, very steadily and without prejudice.

“How you strike a contemporary — that’s what I want to know,” she said, addressing the figure in the glass. “If I saw you in the street, should I turn to look at you again? You appear to be intelligent, and there is clearly no nonsense about you — or not more than is necessary. If I were a woman I think I should dislike you — yes, you are sufficiently attractive for that. If I were a man —”

But here she paused. She had, she assured herself, no very great interest in what she would think of herself if she were a man.