Louis [changing color] Do you mean, operate on me?  Ugh!  No, thank you.

Walpole.  Never fear:  you wont feel anything.  Youll be under an anaesthetic, of course.  And it will be extraordinarily interesting.

Louis.  Oh, well, if it would interest you, and if it wont hurt, thats another matter.  How much will you give me to let you do it?

Walpole [rising indignantly] How much!  What do you mean?

Louis.  Well, you dont expect me to let you cut me up for nothing, do you?

Walpole.  Will you paint my portrait for nothing?

Louis.  No; but I’ll give you the portrait when its painted; and you can sell it afterwards for perhaps double the money.  But I cant sell my nuciform sac when youve cut it out.

Walpole.  Ridgeon:  did you ever hear anything like this! [To Louis] Well, you can keep your nuciform sac, and your tubercular lung, and your diseased brain:  Ive done with you.  One would think I was not conferring a favor on the fellow! [He returns to his stool in high dudgeon].

Sir Patrick.  That leaves only one medical man who has not withdrawn from your case, Mr. Dubedat.  You have nobody left to appeal to now but Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington.

Walpole.  If I were you, B. B., I shouldnt touch him with a pair of tongs.  Let him take his lungs to the Brompton Hospital.  They wont cure him; but theyll teach him manners.

B. B. My weakness is that I have never been able to say No, even to the most thoroughly undeserving people.  Besides, I am bound to say that I dont think it is possible in medical practice to go into the question of the value of the lives we save.  Just consider, Ridgeon.  Let me put it to you, Paddy.  Clear your mind of cant, Walpole.

Walpole [indignantly] My mind is clear of cant.

B. B. Quite so.  Well now, look at my practice.  It is what I suppose you would call a fashionable practice, a smart practice, a practice among the best people.  You ask me to go into the question of whether my patients are of any use either to themselves or anyone else.  Well, if you apply any scientific test known to me, you will achieve a reductio ad absurdum.  You will be driven to the conclusion that the majority of them would be, as my friend Mr J. M. Barrie has tersely phrased it, better dead.  Better dead.  There are exceptions, no doubt.  For instance, there is the court, an essentially social-democratic institution, supported out of public funds by the public because the public wants it and likes it.  My court patients are hard-working people who give satisfaction, undoubtedly.  Then I have a duke or two whose estates are probably better managed than they would be in public hands.  But as to most of the rest, if I once began to argue about them, unquestionably the verdict would be, Better dead.  When they actually do die, I sometimes have to offer