The doctor was a man about forty years of age, robust, with every
appearance of a strong character. In the buttonhole of the frock coat
he wore was a red rosette, the decoration of some order. Confused and
nervous as George was, he got a vague impression of the physician’s
richly furnished office, with its bronzes, marbles and tapestries.
The doctor signaled to the young man to be seated in the chair before
his desk. George complied, and then, as he wiped away the perspiration
from his forehead, stammered out a few words, explaining his errand. Of
course, he said, it could not be true, but it was a man’s duty not
to take any chances in such a matter. “I have not been a man of loose
life,” he added; “I have not taken so many chances as other men.”
The doctor cut him short with the brief remark that one chance was all
that was necessary. Instead of discussing such questions, he would make
an examination. “We do not say positively in these cases until we have
made a blood test. That is the one way to avoid the possibility of
mistake.”
A drop of blood was squeezed out of George’s finger on to a little glass
plate. The doctor retired to an adjoining room, and the victim sat
alone in the office, deriving no enjoyment from the works of art which
surrounded him, but feeling like a prisoner who sits in the dock with
his life at stake while the jury deliberates.
The doctor returned, calm and impassive, and seated himself in his
office-chair.
“Well, doctor?” asked George. He was trembling with terror.
“Well,” was the reply, “there is no doubt whatever.”
George wiped his forehead. He could not credit the words. “No doubt
whatever? In what sense?”
“In the bad sense,” said the other.
He began to write a prescription, without seeming to notice how George
turned page with terror. “Come,” he said, after a silence, “you must
have known the truth pretty well.”
“No, no, sir!” exclaimed George.
“Well,” said the other, “you have syphilis.”
George was utterly stunned. “My God!” he exclaimed.
The doctor, having finished his prescription, looked up and observed his
condition. “Don’t trouble yourself, sir. Out of every seven men you meet
upon the street, in society, or at the theater, there is at least one
who has been in your condition. One out of seven--fifteen per cent!”
George was staring before him. He spoke low, as if to himself. “I know
what I am going to do.”
“And I know also,” said the doctor, with a smile. “There is your
prescription. You are going to take it to the drugstore and have it put
up.”
George took the prescription, mechanically, but whispered, “No, sir.”
“Yes, sir, you are going to do as everybody else does.”
“No, because my situation is not that of everybody else. I know what I
am going to do.”
Said the doctor: “Five times out of ten, in the chair where you are
sitting, people talk like that, perfectly sincerely. Each one believes
himself more unhappy than all the others; but after thinking it over,
and listening to me, they understand that this disease is a companion
with whom one can live. Just as in every household, one gets along at
the cost of mutual concessions, that’s all. Come, sir, I tell you again,
there is nothing about it that is not perfectly ordinary, perfectly
natural, perfectly common; it is an accident which can happen to any
one. It is a great mistake that people speak if this as the ‘French
Disease,’ for there is none which is more universal. Under the picture
of this disease, addressing myself to those who follow the oldest
profession in the world, I would write the famous phrase: ‘Here is your
master. It is, it was, or it must be.’”
George was putting the prescription into the outside pocket of his
coat, stupidly, as if he did not know what he was doing. “But, sir,” he
exclaimed, “I should have been spared!”
“Why?” inquired the other. “Because you are a man of position, because
you are rich? Look around you, sir. See these works of art in my
room. Do you imagine that such things have been presented to me by
chimney-sweeps?”
“But, Doctor,” cried George, with a moan, “I have never been a
libertine. There was never any one, you understand me, never any one
could have been more careful in his pleasures. If I were to tell you
that in all my life I have only had two mistresses, what would you
answer to that?”
“I would answer, that a single one would have been sufficient to bring
you to me.”
“No, sir!” cried George. “It could not have been either of those women.”
He went on to tell the doctor about his first mistress, and then about
Lizette. Finally he told about Henriette, how much he adored her. He
could really use such a word--he loved her most tenderly. She was so
good--and he had thought himself so lucky!
As he went on, he could hardly keep from going to pieces. “I had
everything,” he exclaimed, “everything a man needed! All who knew me
envied me. And then I had to let those fellows drag me off to that
miserable supper-party! And now here I am! My future is ruined, my whole
existence poisoned! What is to become of me? Everybody will avoid me--I
shall be a pariah, a leper!”
He paused, and then in sudden wild grief exclaimed, “Come, now! Would
it not be better that I should take myself out of the way? At least, I
should not suffer any more. You see that there could not be any one
more unhappy than myself--not any one, I tell you, sir, not any one!”
Completely overcome, he began to weep in his handkerchief.
The doctor got up, and went to him. “You must be a man,” he said, “and
not cry like a child.”
“But sir,” cried the young man, with tears running down his cheeks,
“if I had led a wild life, if I had passed my time in dissipation with
chorus girls, then I could understand it. Then I would say that I had
deserved it.”
The doctor exclaimed with emphasis, “No, no! You would not say it.
However, it is of no matter--go on.”
“I tell you that I would say it. I am honest, and I would say that I
had deserved it. But no, I have worked, I have been a regular grind. And
now, when I think of the shame that is in store for me, the disgusting
things, the frightful catastrophes to which I am condemned--”
“What is all this you are telling me?” asked the doctor, laughing.
“Oh, I know, I know!” cried the other, and repeated what his friend
had told him about the man in a wheel-chair. “And they used to call me
handsome Raoul! That was my name--handsome Raoul!”
“Now, my dear sir,” said the doctor, cheerfully, “wipe your eyes one
last time, blow your nose, put your handkerchief into your pocket, and
hear me dry-eyed.”
George obeyed mechanically. “But I give you fair warning,” he said, “you
are wasting your time.”
“I tell you--” began the other.
“I know exactly what you are going to tell me!” cried George.
“Well, in that case, there is nothing more for you to do here--run
along.”
“Since I am here,” said the patient submissively, “I will hear you.”
“Very well, then. I tell you that if you have the will and the
perseverance, none of the things you fear will happen to you.”
“Of course, it is your duty to tell me that.”
“I will tell you that there are one hundred thousand like you in
Paris, alert, and seemingly well. Come, take what you were just
saying--wheel-chairs. One doesn’t see so many of them.”
“No, that’s true,” said George.
“And besides,” added the doctor, “a good many people who ride in them
are not there for the cause you think. There is no more reason why
you should be the victim of a catastrophe than any of the one hundred
thousand. The disease is serious, nothing more.”
“You admit that it is a serious disease?” argued George.
“Yes.”
“One of the most serious?”
“Yes, but you have the good fortune--”
“The GOOD fortune?”
“Relatively, if you please. You have the good fortune to be infected
with one of the diseases over which we have the most certain control.”
“Yes, yes,” exclaimed George, “but the remedies are worse than the
disease.”
“You deceive yourself,” replied the other.
“You are trying to make me believe that I can be cured?”
“You can be.”
“And that I am not condemned?”
“I swear it to you.”
“You are not deceiving yourself, you are not deceiving me? Why, I was
told--”
The doctor laughed, contemptuously. “You were told, you were told! I’ll
wager that you know the laws of the Chinese concerning party-walls.”
“Yes, naturally,” said George. “But I don’t see what they have to do
with it.”
“Instead of teaching you such things,” was the reply, “it would have
been a great deal better to have taught you about the nature and cause
of diseases of this sort. Then you would have known how to avoid the
contagion. Such knowledge should be spread abroad, for it is the
most important knowledge in the world. It should be found in every
newspaper.”
This remark gave George something of a shock, for his father had owned
a little paper in the provinces, and he had a sudden vision of the way
subscribers would have fallen off, if he had printed even so much as the
name of this vile disease.
“And yet,” pursued the doctor, “you publish romances about adultery!”
“Yes,” said George, “that’s what the readers want.”
“They don’t want the truth about venereal diseases,” exclaimed the
other. “If they knew the full truth, they would no longer think that
adultery was romantic and interesting.”
He went on to give his advice as to the means of avoiding such diseases.
There was really but one rule. It was: To love but one woman, to take
her as a virgin, and to love her so much that she would never deceive
you. “Take that from me,” added the doctor, “and teach it to your son,
when you have one.”
George’s attention was caught by this last sentence.
“You mean that I shall be able to have children?” he cried.
“Certainly,” was the reply.
“Healthy children?”
“I repeat it to you; if you take care of yourself properly for a long
time, conscientiously, you have little to fear.”
“That’s certain?”
“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”
George felt as if he had suddenly emerged from a dungeon. “Why, then,”
he exclaimed, “I shall be able to marry!”
“You will be able to marry,” was the reply.
“You are not deceiving me? You would not give me that hope, you would
not expose me? How soon will I be able to marry?”
“In three or four years,” said the doctor.
“What!” cried George in consternation. “In three or four years? Not
before?”
“Not before.”
“How is that? Am I going to be sick all that time? Why, you told me just
now--”
Said the doctor: “The disease will no longer be dangerous to you,
yourself--but you will be dangerous to others.”
“But,” the young man cried, in despair, “I am to be married a month from
now.”
“That is impossible.”
“But I cannot do any differently. The contract is ready! The banns have
been published! I have given my word!”
“Well, you are a great one!” the doctor laughed. “Just now you were
looking for your revolver! Now you want to be married within the month.”
“But, Doctor, it is necessary!”
“But I forbid it.”
“As soon as I knew that the disease is not what I imagined, and that I
could be cured, naturally I didn’t want to commit suicide. And as soon
as I make up my mind not to commit suicide, I have to take up my regular
life. I have to keep my engagements; I have to get married.”
“No,” said the doctor.
“Yes, yes!” persisted George, with blind obstinacy. “Why, Doctor, if I
didn’t marry it would be a disaster. You are talking about something
you don’t understand. I, for my part--it is not that I am anxious to be
married. As I told you, I had almost a second family. Lizette’s little
brothers adored me. But it is my aunt, an old maid; and, also, my mother
is crazy about the idea. If I were to back out now, she would die of
chagrin. My aunt would disinherit me, and she is the one who has the
family fortune. Then, too, there is my father-in-law, a regular dragoon
for his principles--severe, violent. He never makes a joke of serious
things, and I tell you it would cost me dear, terribly dear. And,
besides, I have given my word.”
“You must take back your word.”
“You still insist?” exclaimed George, in despair. “But then, suppose
that it were possible, how could I take back my signature which I put at
the bottom of the deed? I have pledged myself to pay in two months for
the attorney’s practice I have purchased!”
“Sir,” said the doctor, “all these things--”
“You are going to tell me that I was lacking in prudence, that I should
never have disposed of my wife’s dowry until after the honeymoon!”
“Sir,” said the doctor, again, “all these considerations are foreign to
me. I am a physician, and nothing but a physician, and I can only
tell you this: If you marry before three or four years, you will be a
criminal.”
George broke out with a wild exclamation. “No sir, you are not merely a
physician! You are also a confessor! You are not merely a scientist; and
it is not enough for you that you observe me as you would some lifeless
thing in your laboratory, and say, ‘You have this; science says that;
now go along with you.’ All my existence depends upon you. It is
your duty to listen to me, because when you know everything you will
understand me, and you will find some way to cure me within a month.”
“But,” protested the doctor, “I wear myself out telling you that such
means do not exist. I shall not be certain of your cure, as much as any
one can be certain, in less than three or four years.”
George was almost beside himself. “I tell you you must find some means!
Listen to me, sir--if I don’t get married I don’t get the dowry! And
will you tell me how I can pay the notes I have signed?”
“Oh,” said the doctor, dryly, “if that is the question, it is very
simple--I will give you a plan to get out of the affair. You will go
and get acquainted with some rich man; you will do everything you can to
gain his confidence; and when you have succeeded, you will plunder him.”
George shook his head. “I am not in any mood for joking.”
“I am not joking,” replied his adviser. “Rob that man, assassinate him
even--that would be no worse crime than you would commit in taking a
young girl in good health in order to get a portion of her dowry,
when at the same time you would have to expose her to the frightful
consequences of the disease which you would give her.”
“Frightful consequences?” echoed George.
“Consequences of which death would not be the most frightful.”
“But, sir, you were saying to me just now--”
“Just now I did not tell you everything. Even reduced, suppressed a
little by our remedies, the disease remains mysterious, menacing, and
in its sum, sufficiently grave. So it would be an infamy to expose your
fiancee in order to avoid an inconvenience, however great that might
be.”
But George was still not to be convinced. Was it certain that this
misfortune would befall Henriette, even with the best attention?
Said the other: “I do not wish to lie to you. No, it is not absolutely
certain, it is probable. And there is another truth which I wish to
tell you now: our remedies are not infallible. In a certain number of
cases--a very small number, scarcely five per cent--they have remained
without effect. You might be one of those exceptions, your wife might be
one. What then?”
“I will employ a word you used just now, yourself. We should have to
expect the worst catastrophes.”
George sat in a state of complete despair.
“Tell me what to do, then,” he said.
“I can tell you only one thing: don’t marry. You have a most serious
blemish. It is as if you owed a debt. Perhaps no one will ever come to
claim it; on the other hand, perhaps a pitiless creditor will come all
at once, presenting a brutal demand for immediate payment. Come now--you
are a business man. Marriage is a contract; to marry without saying
anything--that means to enter into a bargain by means of passive
dissimulation. That’s the term, is it not? It is dishonesty, and it
ought to come under the law.”
George, being a lawyer, could appreciate the argument, and could think
of nothing to say to it.
“What shall I do?” he asked.
The other answered, “Go to your father-in-law and tell him frankly the
truth.”
“But,” cried the young man, wildly, “there will be no question then of
three or four years’ delay. He will refuse his consent altogether.”
“If that is the case,” said the doctor, “don’t tell him anything.”
“But I have to give him a reason, or I don’t know what he will do. He
is the sort of man to give himself to the worst violence, and again my
fiancee would be lost to me. Listen, doctor. From everything I have said
to you, you may perhaps think I am a mercenary man. It is true that I
want to get along in the world, that is only natural. But Henriette has
such qualities; she is so much better than I, that I love her, really,
as people love in novels. My greatest grief--it is not to give up the
practice I have bought--although, indeed, it would be a bitter blow to
me; my greatest grief would be to lose Henriette. If you could only see
her, if you only knew her--then you would understand. I have her picture
here--”
The young fellow took out his card-case. And offered a photograph to the
doctor, who gently refused it. The other blushed with embarrassment.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “I am ridiculous. That happens to me,
sometimes. Only, put yourself in my place--I love her so!” His voice
broke.
“My dear boy,” said the doctor, feelingly, “that is exactly why you
ought not to marry her.”
“But,” he cried, “if I back out without saying anything they will guess
the truth, and I shall be dishonored.”
“One is not dishonored because one is ill.”
“But with such a disease! People are so stupid. I myself, yesterday--I
should have laughed at anyone who had got into such a plight; I should
have avoided him, I should have despised him!” And suddenly George
broke down again. “Oh!” he cried, “if I were the only one to suffer; but
she--she is in love with me. I swear it to you! She is so good; and she
will be so unhappy!”
The doctor answered, “She would be unhappier later on.”
“It will be a scandal!” George exclaimed.
“You will avoid one far greater,” the other replied.
Suddenly George set his lips with resolution. He rose from his seat. He
took several twenty-franc pieces from his pocket and laid them quietly
upon the doctor’s desk--paying the fee in cash, so that he would not
have to give his name and address. He took up his gloves, his cane and
his hat, and rose.
“I will think it over,” he said. “I thank you, Doctor. I will come back
next week as you have told me. That is--probably I will.”
He was about to leave.
The doctor rose, and he spoke in a voice of furious anger. “No,” he
said, “I shan’t see you next week, and you won’t even think it over. You
came here knowing what you had; you came to ask advice of me, with the
intention of paying no heed to it, unless it conformed to your wishes.
A superficial honesty has driven you to take that chance in order to
satisfy your conscience. You wanted to have somebody upon whom you could
put off, bye and bye, the consequences of an act whose culpability you
understand! No, don’t protest! Many of those who come here think and act
as you think, and as you wish to act; but the marriage made against
my will has generally been the source of such calamities that now I am
always afraid of not having been persuasive enough, and it even seems to
me that I am a little to blame for these misfortunes. I should have been
able to prevent them; they would not have happened if those who are the
authors of them knew what I know and had seen what I have seen. Swear to
me, sir, that you are going to break off that marriage!”
George was greatly embarrassed, and unwilling to reply. “I cannot swear
to you at all, Doctor; I can only tell you again that I will think it
over.”
“That WHAT over?”
“What you have told me.”
“What I have told you is true! You cannot bring any new objections; and
I have answered those which you have presented to me; therefore, your
mind ought to be made up.”
Groping for a reply, George hesitated. He could not deny that he had
made inquiry about these matters before he had come to the doctor. But
he said that he was not al all certain that he had this disease. The
doctor declared it, and perhaps it was true, but the most learned
physicians were sometimes deceived.
He remembered something he had read in one of the medical books. “Dr.
Ricord maintains that after a certain period the disease is no longer
contagious. He has proven his contentions by examples. Today you produce
new examples to show that he is wrong! Now, I want to do what’s right,
but surely I have the right to think it over. And when I think it
over, I realize that all the evils with which you threaten me are only
probable evils. In spite of your desire to terrify me, you have been
forced to admit that possibly my marriage would not have any troublesome
consequence for my wife.”
The doctor found difficulty in restraining himself. But he said, “Go on.
I will answer you afterwards.”
And George blundered ahead in his desperation. “Your remedies are
powerful, you tell me; and for the calamities of which you speak to
befall me, I would have to be among the rare exceptions--also my
wife would have to be among the number of those rare exceptions. If a
mathematician were to apply the law of chance to these facts, the result
of his operation would show but slight chance of a catastrophe, as
compared with the absolute certainty of a series of misfortunes,
sufferings, troubles, tears, and perhaps tragic accidents which
the breaking of my engagement would cause. So I say that the
mathematician--who is, even more than you, a man of science, a man of
a more infallible science--the mathematician would conclude that wisdom
was not with you doctors, but with me.”
“You believe it, sir!” exclaimed the other. “But you deceive yourself.”
And he continued, driving home his point with a finger which seemed to
George to pierce his very soul. “Twenty cases identical with your own
have been patiently observed, from the beginning to the end. Nineteen
times the woman was infected by her husband; you hear me, sir, nineteen
times out of twenty! You believe that the disease is without danger, and
you take to yourself the right to expose your wife to what you call the
chance of your being one of those exceptions, for whom our remedies
are without effect. Very well; it is necessary that you should know the
disease which your wife, without being consulted, will run a chance of
contracting. Take that book, sir; it is the work of my teacher. Read it
yourself. Here, I have marked the passage.”
He held out the open book; but George could not lift a hand to take it.
“You do not wish to read it?” the other continued. “Listen to me.”
And in a voice trembling with passion, he read: “‘I have watched the
spectacle of an unfortunate young woman, turned into a veritable monster
by means of a syphilitic infection. Her face, or rather let me say
what was left of her face, was nothing but a flat surface seamed with
scars.’”
George covered his face, exclaiming, “Enough, sir! Have mercy!”
But the other cried, “No, no! I will go to the very end. I have a
duty to perform, and I will not be stopped by the sensibility of your
nerves.”
He went on reading: “‘Of the upper lip not a trace was left; the ridge
of the upper gums appeared perfectly bare.’” But then at the young man’s
protests, his resolution failed him. “Come,” he said, “I will stop. I am
sorry for you--you who accept for another person, for the woman you say
you love, the chance of a disease which you cannot even endure to hear
described. Now, from whom did that woman get syphilis? It is not I who
am speaking, it is the book. ‘From a miserable scoundrel who was not
afraid to enter into matrimony when he had a secondary eruption.’ All
that was established later on--‘and who, moreover, had thought it best
not to let his wife be treated for fear of awakening her suspicions!’”
The doctor closed the book with a bang. “What that man has done, sir, is
what you want to do.”
George was edging toward the door; he could no longer look the doctor in
the eye. “I should deserve all those epithets and still more brutal ones
if I should marry, knowing that my marriage would cause such horrors.
But that I do not believe. You and your teachers--you are specialists,
and consequently you are driven to attribute everything to the disease
you make the subject of your studies. A tragic case, an exceptional
case, holds a kind of fascination for you; you think it can never be
talked about enough.”
“I have heard that argument before,” said the doctor, with an effort at
patience.
“Let me go on, I beg you,” pleaded George. “You have told me that out of
every seven men there is one syphilitic. You have told me that there are
one hundred thousand in Paris, coming and going, alert, and apparently
well.”
“It is true,” said the doctor, “that there are one hundred thousand
who are actually at this moment not visibly under the influence of the
disease. But many thousands have passed into our hospitals, victims of
the most frightful ravages that our poor bodies can support. These--you
do not see them, and they do not count for you. But again, if it
concerned no one but yourself, you might be able to argue thus. What I
declare to you, what I affirm with all the violence of my conviction,
is that you have not the right to expose a human creature to such
chances--rare, as I know, but terrible, as I know still better. What
have you to answer to that?”
“Nothing,” stammered George, brought to his knees at last. “You are
right about that. I don’t know what to think.”
“And in forbidding you marriage,” continued the doctor, “is it the same
as if I forbade it forever? Is it the same as if I told you that you
could never be cured? On the contrary, I hold out to you every hope; but
I demand of you a delay of three or four years, because it will take me
that time to find out if you are among the number of those unfortunate
ones whom I pity with all my heart, for whom the disease is without
mercy; because during that time you will be dangerous to your wife and
to your children. The children I have not yet mentioned to you.”
Here the doctor’s voice trembled slightly. He spoke with moving
eloquence. “Come, sir, you are an honest man; you are too young for such
things not to move you; you are not insensible to duty. It is impossible
that I shan’t be able to find a way to your heart, that I shan’t be
able to make you obey me. My emotion in speaking to you proves that I
appreciate your suffering, that I suffer with you. It is in the name of
my sincerity that I implore you. You have admitted it--that you have not
the right to expose your wife to such miseries. But it is not only your
wife that you strike; you may attack in her your own children. I exclude
you for a moment from my thought--you and her. It is in the name of
these innocents that I implore you; it is the future, it is the race
that I defend. Listen to me, listen to me! Out of the twenty households
of which I spoke, only fifteen had children; these fifteen had
twenty-eight. Do you know how many out of these twenty-eight survived?
Three, sir! Three out of twenty-eight! Syphilis is above everything a
murderer of children. Herod reigns in France, and over all the earth,
and begins each year his massacre of the innocents; and if it be not
blasphemy against the sacredness of life, I say that the most happy are
those who have disappeared. Visit our children’s hospitals! We know too
well the child of syphilitic parents; the type is classical; the doctors
can pick it out anywhere. Those little old creatures who have the
appearance of having already lived, and who have kept the stigmata of
all out infirmities, of all our decay. They are the victims of fathers
who have married, being ignorant of what you know--things which I should
like to go and cry out in the public places.”
The doctor paused, and then in a solemn voice continued: “I have told
you all, without exaggeration. Think it over. Consider the pros and
cons; sum up the possible misfortunes and the certain miseries. But
disregard yourself, and consider that there are in one side of the
scales the misfortunes of others, and in the other your own. Take care
that you are just.”
George was at last overcome. “Very well,” he said, “I give way. I
won’t get married. I will invent some excuse; I will get a delay of six
months. More than that, I cannot do.”
The doctor exclaimed, “I need three years--I need four years!”
“No, Doctor!” persisted George. “You can cure me in less time than
that.”
The other answered, “No! No! No!”
George caught him by the hand, imploringly. “Yes! Science in all
powerful!”
“Science is not God,” was the reply. “There are no longer any miracles.”
“If only you wanted to do it!” cried the young man, hysterically. “You
are a learned man; seek, invent, find something! Try some new plan with
me; give me double the dose, ten times the does; make me suffer. I give
myself up to you; I will endure everything--I swear it! There ought to
be some way to cure me within six months. Listen to me! I tell you I
can’t answer for myself with that delay. Come; it is in the name of my
wife, in the name of my children, that I implore you. Do something for
them!”
The doctor had reached the limit of his patience. “Enough, sir!” he
cried. “Enough!”
But nothing could stop the wretched man. “On my knees!” he cried. “I
put myself on my knees before you! Oh! If only you would do it! I would
bless you; I would adore you, as one adores a god! All my gratitude, all
my life--half my fortune! For mercy’s sake, Doctor, do something; invent
something; make some discovery--have pity!”
The doctor answered gravely, “Do you wish me to do more for you than for
the others?”
George answered, unblushingly, ‘answered, unblushingly, “Yes!” He was
beside himself with terror and distress.
The other’s reply was delivered in a solemn tone. “Understand, sir,
for every one of out patients we do all that we can, whether it be the
greatest personage, or the last comer to out hospital clinic. We have no
secrets in reserve for those who are more fortunate, or less fortunate
than the others, and who are in a hurry to be cured.”
George gazed at him for a moment in bewilderment and despair, and then
suddenly bowed his head. “Good-by, Doctor,” he answered.
“Au revoir, sir,” the other corrected--with what proved to be prophetic
understanding. For George was destined to see him again--even though he
had made up his mind to the contrary!