DOCTOR. I forbid you.
GEORGE. You can’t mean that seriously. If this disease is not what I imagined and if I can be cured, I shan’t commit suicide. If I don’t kill myself, I must take up the ordinary course of my life. I must fulfill my engagements: I must be married.
DOCTOR. No.
GEORGE. If my engagement were broken off it would be absolutely disastrous. You talk of it like that because you don’t know. I didn’t want to get married. I have told you—I had almost a second family; the children adored me. It is my old aunt, who owns all the property, who has pushed on the match. Then my mother wants to see me ‘settled’ as she says. The only thing in the world she wants is to see her baby grandchildren, and she wonders twenty times a day whether she will live long enough. Since the question first came up she simply hasn’t thought of anything else; it’s the dream of her life. And then I tell you I have begun to adore Henriette. If I draw back now my mother would die of grief and I should be disinherited by my aunt. Even that isn’t all. You don’t know my father-in-law’s character! He is a man of regular high old principles; and he has a temper like the devil. What’s more, he simply worships his daughter. It would cost me dear, I can assure you. He would call me to account—I don’t know what would happen. So there are my mother’s health, my aunt’s fortune, my future, my honor, perhaps my life, all at stake. Besides, I tell you I have given my word.
DOCTOR. You must take it back.
GEORGE. Well, since you stick to it, even if that were possible, I could not take back my signature to the contract for the purchase of a notary’s practice in two months time.
DOCTOR. All these—
GEORGE. You won’t tell me that I have been imprudent because I have not disposed of my wife’s dowry till after the honeymoon—
DOCTOR. All these considerations are foreign to me. I am a physician, nothing but a physician. I can only tell you this: if you marry before three or four years have elapsed you will be a criminal.
GEORGE. No, no, you are more than a physician: you are a confessor as well. You are not only a man of science. You can’t observe me as you would something in your laboratory and then simply say: ‘You have this, science says that. Now be off with you.’ My whole life depends upon you. You must listen to me; because when you know everything you will understand the situation and will find the means to cure me in a month.