"Society has no right to expect too much from any one. The whole sacrifice mustn't fall where it crushes. I say that such a case should be treated by the public authorities, and should be treated once for all."
She rose and looked into his eyes, as if to say, 'You were society, and you did not dare.' In a moment she turned away, and said, "Don't you believe in a soul?"
"Yes," he smiled back. "And that poor soul and others like it, many, many thousands, who cannot grow, should be at rest—one long rest; to let other souls grow, unblasted by their foul touch."
"I have thought so," she replied calmly, taking his belief as an equal. "To let joy into the world somewhere before death." Her wistful tone rang out into the room. "But that would be murder," she continued. "We should have to call it murder, shouldn't we? And that is a fearful word. I could never quite forget it. I should always ask myself if I were right, if I had the right to judge. I am a coward. The work is too much for me."
"We will not think of it," Sommers replied abruptly, unconsciously putting himself in company with her, as she had herself with him. "We have but to follow the conventions of medicine and wait."
"Yes, wait!"
"Medicine, medicine," he continued irritably. "All our medicine is but a contrivance to keep up the farce, to continue the ills of humanity, to keep the wretched and diseased where they have no right to be!"
"And you are a doctor! How can you be?"
"Because," he answered in the same tone of unprofessional honesty that he had used toward her, "like most men, I am a coward and conventional. I have learned to do as the others do. Medicine and education!" Sommers laughed ironically. "They are the two sciences where men turn and turn and emit noise and do nothing. The doctor and the teacher learn a few tricks and keep on repeating them as the priest does the ceremony of the mass."
"That's about right for the teacher," she laughed. "We cut our cloth almost all alike."