"Plant new souls in place of the old!"
Renault nodded gravely.
"That's the true medicine—the root medicine,—to take an imperfect organism and develop it, mould it to the perfected idea. Life is plastic,—human beings are plastic,—that is one important thing to remember!"
"But you are a surgeon?"
Renault's lips quivered with one of his ironical smiles.
"I was a surgeon, just as I was a materialist. When I was young, I was caught by the lure of so-called science, and became a surgeon, because it was precise, definite,—and I am something of a dab at it now—ask the boys here! … But surgery is artisan work. Younger hands will always beat you. Pallegrew in there is as good as I am now. There is nothing creative in surgery; it is on the order of mending shoes. One needs to get beyond that…. And here is where we get beyond patching…. Don't think we are just cranks here. We do what we can with the accepted tools,—the knife and the pill. But we try to go farther—a little way."
They descended to the basement of the main house where the more active children were playing games.
"We have to teach some of them the primitive instincts,—the play instinct, for example,—and we have a workroom, where we try to teach them the absorbing excitement of work…. I am thinking of starting a school next. Don't you want to try a hand at a new sort of education?"
So, pausing now and then to joke with a child or speak to an assistant, Renault took Isabelle over his "shop" once more, explaining casually his purposes. As a whole, it developed before her eyes that here was a laboratory of the human being, a place where by different processes the diseased, the twisted, the maimed, the inhibited, the incomplete were analyzed and reconstructed. As they emerged on the broad platform where they had stood the night before, Isabelle asked:—
"Why is it you work only with children?"