One of my chief objections to dentists is that they will never listen to reason; explanations are quite thrown away on them.  They only let you talk at all in order to get your face open, and then into it they plunge their powerful antiseptic-tasting hands and you lose something.  I never go near a dentist without paying the extreme penalty. (None of those cunning little gold-tipped caps or reinforced concrete suspension-bridges for me.  Out it comes.  Blood and iron every time).  I admit they frequently appease my anguish.  Almost invariably among the teeth of which they relieve me at each sitting is included the offending one.  But still I maintain my right to have a say in my own afflictions.  The doctors let one.  I’ve got a physician who lets me have any disease I fancy (except German measles and Asiatic cholera; for patriotic reasons he won’t hear a good word spoken for either of them; says we’ve got just as good diseases of our own.  Damned insularity!).

If I send for this doctor he comes along, sits quietly beside my bed, eating my grapes, while I tell him where the pain isn’t.  The recital over he hands me a selection of ailments to pick from.  I choose one.  He tells me what the symptoms are, drinks my invalid port, creeps downstairs and breaks the news to the hushed and awe-stricken family.  A chap like that makes suffering a pleasure and is a great comfort in a home like mine, where a sick bed is the only sort you are allowed to lie in after 10 A.M.  Without the fellow’s ready sympathy I doubt if I should secure any sleep at all.  One gets no assistance of that kind from dentists, although they give you more pain in ten seconds than a doctor does in ten years.

No dentist ever sees me home after the slaughter, orders me a diet of chicken breast, peche Melba and champagne, or warns my family that I am on no account to be disturbed until lunch.  No, they jerk your jaw off its hinges and dump your remains on the doorstep for the L.C.C. rubbish cart to collect.

Another thing:  dentists should not be allowed out loose about the streets.  They exercise a blighting influence.  You are strolling along in the sunshine, head high, chest expanded, telling some wide-eyed young thing what you and HAIG did to LUDENDORFF, when suddenly you meet the dentist.  You look at him, he looks at you, and his eyes seem to say, “What ho, my hero!  Last week you went to ground under my sofa and couldn’t be dislodged until I put the page-boy in to ferret you.”

“And what happened then,” inquires the wide-eyed young thing, “after you had caught the Hun tank by the tail and ripped it up with a tin-opener?”

“After that,” says the eye of the dentist, “you wept, you prayed, you lay on the floor and kicked, you—­”

“And did you kill all the crew yourself?” bleats the maiden, “single-handed —­every one of them?”

“Oh, I—­er,” you stutter—­“what I mean to say—­that is—­Oh, dash it, let’s go and get tea somewhere, what?”