Clara Ross had never fit the mold assigned to young women in the bustling towns of the East Coast. Instead of fancywork and drawing-room conversation, she'd grown up tramping behind her mother through the half-wild margins of Philadelphia, learning the names of every weed and blossom in both English and Latin. By fourteen, she could treat a bad case of colic in a milk cow and splint a broken wing on a thrush. By sixteen, she'd read every medical journal she could get her hands on, scavenging them from the bins behind the city's grander homes.
She was proud of her education, but she felt its seeming uselessness acutely. Her cousins, the Mayfields, whispered about her "unwomanly" hobbies and suggested she'd be better off with a sewing needle than a dissecting kit. Clara tried to distinguish herself in socially acceptable pursuits: She learned to sing, to draw, to embroider with passable skill, but nothing lit her up the way science and the outdoors did.
The city's eligible bachelors were unimpressed by her wit and the ink stains perpetually smudged on her fingers. And the few daring enough to court her were soon discouraged by the prospect of a wife who read more than she gossiped and whose practical shoes were often caked in mud.
