The other shook his head doubtfully.
“If your view were the correct one,” pursued Irwin, “women, in all their habitual acts of fascination (which are Nature’s precursors of love) would strive more to touch the mental, the spiritual side of men. But they don’t. They apply their own self-learned reasoning to the opposite sex. They decorate themselves for man with the feathers of male birds (you’ll find that in your Darwin), which Nature gave the male birds to charm the females. They strike at his senses, and they hit his mental side, when he has any, through them.”
“You’re a sad misogynist, Irwin!” Dr. Goodno was smiling, but there was a sub-note of earnestness beneath the lightness of his tone. “And you forget that women have an imaginative and ideal side which is superior to man’s. They can create the mental, possibly, where men are most dependent upon sense-impression. Love involves more of the soul in woman, Irwin.”
The house surgeon unwound his legs. “Or less,” he said tersely. “Havelock Ellis says a good thing. He says that while a man may be said to live on a plane, a woman is more apt to live on the upward or downward slope of a curve. She is always going up or coming down. That’s why a woman, when an artificial civilization hasn’t stepped in to forbid it, is forever talking about her health. And, spiritually, as well as physically, she is just as apt to be coming down as going up. Her proportion is wrong. Your bad woman disrespects her soul; your good woman disrespects her body. The wholesome woman disrespects neither and respects both. But very few young women are wholesome nowadays. Their training has been against it! The best way for a woman to treat her soul is to realize that her soul and body belong together, and have to live together the rest of her natural life. She needn’t forget this just because she happens to fall in love! No woman can marry a man whom accident has robbed of his physical side and not wrong herself. She shuts off the avenues of her senses. There is no thrill of ear or hand—no comeliness for her eye to dwell upon, and her spiritual love, so beautiful to begin with, starves itself slowly to death!”
“Very good on general principles,” said Dr. Goodno. “That’s the trouble. It’s easy enough to sermonize in the pulpit, or the clinic either, but when we come to concrete examples, it’s difficult. The particular instance is troublesome. Now, in the case of this man in the surgical ward, if he recovered at all, but remained a hopeless cripple, you would pack him off into a rayless solitude for the rest of his life, and tell the girl who loves him to go and love somebody else. You wouldn’t leave it to her—even if he was willing.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“No! I would be afraid to arrogate to myself the judgment upon two human souls. There are times when what we call consistency vanishes and something greater and more noble stands up to make it ashamed. I’ll tell you now, Irwin, if the one woman in the world to me—the woman I loved—if my wife—had been brought where the case we’ve been speaking of promises to be—if there were nothing but her eyes left and the something that is back of them—I tell you, I’d have married her! Yes, and I’d have thanked God for it!”
His companion tossed the dead butt of his cigar into the grate and rose to go to the ward. “Goodno,” he said, and his voice was unsteady, “I believe it! You would; and I wish to the Lord I knew what that meant!”
The superintendent sat long thinking. He was still pondering when his wife entered the room. “I’ve just been talking with Irwin,” he said, “about the last trephine case—the one you spoke to me of. He doesn’t seem too hopeful, I’m sorry to say.”