“Oh, I know what you are going to say, doctor, but no amount of preparatory treatment would ever have made Smith anything but a mean old cuss, anyhow.”
“Perhaps you are right,” I answered, “and, come to think of it, as your family is a comparatively new one to me, I believe I’ll insist on monthly settlements of my bills.”
“Well, you know your own business better than I do, but I know Smith pretty well, and I don’t think it will do any harm,—unless he gets mad and changes doctors. I hope he won’t do that, for I am beginning to like you pretty well, and I dread a change. There’s no telling what these highly ‘respectable’ people will do, you know, and now that you are beginning to understand my case a little, a change of doctors might be disastrous. You see, I can’t talk to everybody as freely as I feel that I can to you.”
“Then I guess I won’t send in any bill, it would be too bad to neglect you, just because your father is—”
“A brute, eh, doctor?”
“N-no, I shouldn’t like to say that,” I replied.
“Because of his eminent respectability, I presume,” said my visitor, grinning sarcastically.
I was discreetly silent.
“Well,” continued the young wiseacre, “I don’t suppose that you and I alone could settle a certain phase of the social problem, even if we were foolish enough to try, but there are some very interesting points that might be discussed upon the question of that veneering of ‘respectability’ for which you seem to have such great reverence. I should like to discuss them with you, did time permit. I assure you that I have given the subject much conscientious study and deep thought.
“There is one point, doctor, in which you physicians are very remiss, and which, for the sake of suffering childhood, I cannot allow to pass unnoticed. I refer to the indiscriminate fashion in which people are allowed to marry, and rear children. Why, when I look about me and see the number of infantile wrecks, who, like myself, are victims of your pernicious social system, I am disgusted. If the principals in matrimonial mistakes were the only ones to suffer, it would be different, but it’s the babies that get the worst of it. And you medical blockheads look on and say nothing. You are too stupid to see anything, perhaps, and therefore have nothing to say.”