‘What is love but a disease?’ Merton asked dreamily. ‘A French savant, Monsieur Janet, says that nobody ever falls in love except when he is a little bit off colour: I forget the French equivalent.’
‘I am coming for you,’ Logan arose in wrath.
‘Sit down. Well, your objection (which it did not need the eyes of an Argus to discover) is that the patients, the lovers young, whose loves are disapproved of by the family, will fall in love with our agents, insist on marrying them, and so the last state of these afflicted parents—or children—will be worse than the first. Is that your objection?’
‘Of course it is; and crushing at that,’ Logan replied.
‘Then science suggests prophylactic measures: something akin to vaccination,’ Merton explained. ‘The agents must be warranted “immune.” Nice new word!’
‘How?’
‘The object,’ Merton answered, ‘is to make it
impossible, or highly improbable, that our agents, after disentangling the affections of the patients, curing them of one attack, will accept their addresses, offered in a second fit of the fever. In brief, the agents must not marry the patients, or not often.’
‘But how can you prevent them if they want to do it?’
‘By a process akin, in the emotional region of our strangely blended nature, to inoculation.’