"He must choose between his genius and his life."
She winced. "I don't believe he can choose," she murmured. "It is his life."
He straightened himself to his enormous height, in dignified recoil from her contradiction.
"I have known many men of genius," he said.
"His genius is different," said she.
He hadn't the heart to say what he had always said, that Prothero's genius was and always had been most peculiarly a disease; but he did not shrink from telling her that at the present crisis it was death.
For he was angry now. He could not help being moved by professional animus, the fury of a man who has brought his difficult, dangerous work to the pitch of unexpected triumph, and sees it taken from his hands and destroyed for a perversity, an incomprehensible caprice.
He was still more deeply stirred by his compassion, his affection for the Protheros. Secretly, he was very fond of Owen, though the poet was impossible; he was even more fond of little Laura. He did not want to see her made a widow because Prothero refused to control his vice. For the literary habit, indulged in to that extent, amounted to a vice. The Doctor had no patience with it. A man was not, after all, a slave to his unwholesome inspiration (it had dawned on him by this time that Prothero had made a joke about it). Prothero could stop it if he liked.
"I've told him plainly," he said, "that what it means to him is death. If you want to keep him, you must stop it."
"How can I?" she moaned.