"I do not believe in that sort of thing and never would," he said, "but I am sure that marriage is the best friend of the race's future."
"Not so long as it is directed even as it now is. Not so long as the diseased 'usband may legally force a child on his wife, or the wife-merely-lazy may refuse to bear a child to a healthy 'usband. A wife can divorce a 'usband because he is sterile through not his own fault, but if he is sterile because he wants sterility, she must continue to be his wife. You speak well as if to make people to breed it is necessary but to go to whip them, or trick them, into a wedding. Marriage does not imply parenthood. That relationship is arbitrary."
This was something more than Jim had counted on. A slow flush mounted to his iron-grey hair. He saw that Muriel attended entirely to her food, and he did not know whether to admire this peace as evidence of her self-control or to wonder how she could hear such things and give no sign of hearing them.
The doctor, however, ran from bad to worse.
"Most of the children in this world are here by accident. They are not wanted, no, because they are too much trouble or too much cost, or they are girls, as the case may be. They are not a tie binding their parents' love by their presence; generally they are a sword to divide it by necessitating economies. What married man, even rich, does not endeavour to limit the number of his little ones, hein?" To Jim's horror the doctor broadly winked. "What unmarried man does not endeavour to suppress his little ones altogether? Both will in private joke the one to the other about it, and both fear it should publicly be known. Marriage? Poof! It is the name of a prix fixe charged for respectability."
Stainton was not the man to try to evade an issue by an attempt to divert the conversation, and he saw that the doctor was not the man to be diverted. As the waiter brought the coffee ("No cognac, thank you," said Boussingault; "no alcohol") Jim challenged direct.
"You shock me," declared the American, "by what you tell me about children not being wanted. I don't agree with you there. Of course, that is sometimes the case in irregular relations, but I think too well of humanity to believe that, by married parents of any means at all, children are not wanted after they get here."
"None?"
Both men turned: it was Muriel that had spoken. Her face grew scarlet under their look.
The doctor's glance was keen.