As he looked down on the woman his thin nostrils twitched once and his lips compressed more firmly.  Then he smiled.  It was an odd, almost demoniacal smile.

“A physician,” he said, half aloud, “has almost as much power as God.  The idea strikes me that we are the personification of that useful symbol.”

He plunged his hands into his pockets, and walked up and down the long thickly carpeted room.

“These are the facts in the case,” he continued.  “The one man I love and unequivocally respect is tied, hand and foot, to that unsexed dehumanized morphine receptacle on the bed.  She is hopeless.  Every known specific has failed, must fail, for she loves the vice.  He has one of the best brains of this day prolific in brains; a distressing capacity for affection, human to the core.  At the age of forty-two, in the maturity of his mental powers, he carries with him a constant sickening sense of humiliation; a proud man, he lives in daily fear of exposure and shame.  At the age of forty-two, in the maturity of his manhood, he meets the woman who conquers his heart, his imagination, who compels his faith by making other women abhorrent to him, who allures and maddens with the certainty of her power to make good his ideal of her.  He cannot marry her; that animal on the bed is capable of living for twenty years.

“So much for him.  A girl of twenty-eight, whose wealth and brain and beauty, and that other something that has not yet been analyzed and labelled, have made her a social star; who has come to wonder, then to resent, then to yawn at the general vanity of life, is suddenly swept out of her calm orbit by a man’s passion; and, with the swiftness of decision natural to her, goes to Europe.  She returns in less than three months.  For these two people there is but one sequel.  The second chapter will be written the first time they are alone.  Then they will go to Europe.  What will be the rest of the book?

“First, there will be an ugly and reverberating scandal.  In the course of a year or two she will compel him to return in the interest of his career.  She will not be able to remain; so proud a woman could not stand the position.  Again he will go with her.  In a word, my friend’s career will be ruined.  So many novelists and reporters have written the remaining chapters of this sort of story that it is hardly worth while for me to go any further.

“So much for them.  Let us consider the other victims—­the children.  A morphine-mother in an asylum, a father in a strange land with a woman who is not his wife, the world cognizant of all the facts of the case.  They grow up at odds with society.  Result, they are morbid, warped, unnormal.  In trite old English, their lives are ruined, as are all lives that have not had a fair chance.”

He returned abruptly to the bedside.  He laid his finger on the woman’s pulse.

“No morphine to-night and she dies.  A worthless wretch is sent where she belongs.  Four people are saved.”