"Yes, my dear;" said the doctor, quietly. "And not have any. Not be able to have any—ever."
Vivian caught her breath with pitying intensity, but her friend went on.
"Never be able to have a child, because I married a man who had gonorrhea. In place of happy love, lonely pain. In place of motherhood, disease. Misery and shame, child. Medicine and surgery, and never any possibility of any child for me."
The girl was pale with horror. "I—I didn't know—" She tried to say something, but the doctor burst out impatiently:
"No! You don't know. I didn't know. Girls aren't taught a word of what's before them till it's too late—not then, sometimes! Women lose every joy in life, every hope, every capacity for service or pleasure. They go down to their graves without anyone's telling them the cause of it all."
"That was why you—left him?" asked Vivian presently.
"Yes, I left him. When I found I could not be a mother I determined to be a doctor, and save other women, if I could." She said this with such slow, grave emphasis that Vivian turned a sudden startled face to her, and went white to the lips.
"I may be wrong," the doctor said, "you have not given me your confidence in this matter. But it is better, a thousand times better, that I should make this mistake than for you to make that. You must not marry Morton Elder."
Vivian did not admit nor deny. She still wore that look of horror.
"You think he has—That?"