"What do you mean by his making himself sick? Overwork?"
"Overwork? Thunder! I don't get as much undisturbed sleep as he did. I've been 'overworking' longer than he has. Work doesn't hurt people—not if they are living sensibly. You people—all of you—are abnormal, almost hysterical, in your attitude towards life. You take the little jobs of life too seriously and aren't serious enough about the big job of living.
"Isadore doesn't realize—never has—that a man needs rest and relaxation. He doesn't know what play means. Treats his body as a machine. He ought to be married. Ought to have a wife and children to think about besides his work—some one to play with. Some one to beat him over the head, if necessary, to distract his attention from the rut his mind has fallen into. He thinks too much over the generations of the future, not enough over this one and the next. And then he just naturally ought to have a wife, as every man who wants to be normally healthy does. Living like a monk and trying to do a real man's work! But what's the use of talking? You won't listen. It'll get you, too—just as sure as sunrise. Then you'll come yelping to me to help you out."
"Why, I'm well," Yetta protested. "I don't know any one in better condition than I am."
"Humph," he snorted.
He finished his coffee, and getting up, stamped about the room impatiently.
"Yetta, why do you suppose Nature divided the race into male and female? For more millions of years than we can count Nature has been at work making women, shaping their bodies by minute steps, forming intricate organs within them—for a special task. Back of you are myriad generations of females. You wouldn't be alive to-day, you'd never have been born, if a single one of them had neglected her woman's work. Do you think that all of a sudden you can break this age-old habit? That you can waste all the pain and travail of your myriad mothers with impunity? You're twenty-four now. For more than five years now you've been thwarting life, rendering barren all the vast time, the appalling agony, the ceaseless struggle, it has cost Nature to produce you—with your chance to pass on the flame of life. Out of all these millions of mothers, thousands and thousands have given their life that the line might be preserved. It doesn't matter at all what reason you can give for not having had children. I admit there are a few good reasons. But Nature is insistent in this matter of the next generation—as cold as a sword's edge. It seems almost like human spite. But you can't blame her. It's such appalling waste to throw away all the toiling, suffering generations back of us. You can't expect Nature to be indifferent; it has cost her so much. And she's got this advantage over God, her punishments come in this life. Four, five, perhaps ten years, you can go along without noticing it. Then you'll come to me. 'I have headaches, backaches. I'm irritable. I don't sleep." I can give you drugs to deaden the headache, dope which will make you seem to sleep. I can ward off a little of Nature's revenge—but I can't cure you. There are plenty of accidents and some kinds of sickness that you can't blame a person for, but drying up into barren, unlovely old maidhood ought to be forbidden by law.
"Lord," he exclaimed, looking at his watch, "it's late. I promised to speak at a Socialist meeting up in the Bronx, but I've got to look in at two cases first. So long."
For a moment Yetta sat still, pondering over what the doctor had said. The thing which impressed her most was the stupendous idea of the unbroken line of mothers which stretched back of her to that dim epoch when the new element of life first appeared on the shores of the primordial sea.