“Forget it!”
“Yes. If you can't help it, why need you worry about it?”
She gave a kind of gasp of astonishment. “Do you really think that would be right?” She edged a little away from Dr. Morrell, as if with distrust.
“Well, no; I can't say that I do,” he returned thoughtfully, without seeming to have noticed her withdrawal. “I don't suppose I was looking at the moral side. It's rather out of my way to do that. If a physician let himself get into the habit of doing that, he might regard nine-tenths of the diseases he has to treat as just penalties, and decline to interfere.”
She fancied that he was amused again, rather than deeply concerned, and she determined to make him own his personal complicity in the matter if she could. “Then you do feel sympathy with your patients? You find it necessary to do so?”
The doctor thought a moment. “I take an interest in their diseases.”
“But you want them to get well?”
“Oh, certainly. I'm bound to do all I can for them as a physician.”
“Nothing more?”
“Yes; I'm sorry for them—for their families, if it seems to be going badly with them.”