Bergan could not help looking the astonishment that he did not express. "It is true," said the doctor, answering the look. "I studied law, and practised it for about two years. But it did not suit me." "Would it be impertinent to ask why?" "Not at all. It gave too much scope, or too little, to my natural antagonism of mind;--too little for mental satisfaction, too much for material advantage. For instance, I was always possessed with an insane desire to clear the guilty man, whether he were my client, or no." "Yet you deny to yourself the credit of generous impulses!" "Stay a little. I was often assailed with an equally insane desire to convict the innocent one--when he was not my client. Do not look so horrified, for the same motive was at the bottom of both. It was because I saw so clearly that, with an exchange of circumstances,--inherited traits, education, temptation, and so forth,--there would also be an exchange of persons." "In that case, it would seem that neither should be convicted." "Exactly. But it was Society that needed to be convicted and punished. There was a real satisfaction in reversing its unrighteous judgments." Bergan felt that he was sinking in a kind of mental quicksand. "But," he objected, catching hold of the first twig of support that offered itself, "you count the man's will for nothing." "With most men, it does count for nothing. Where one man performs either a good or a bad action deliberately, looking behind and before him, nine hundred and ninety-nine do it because of the pressure of outward circumstance." "You think, then," said Bergan, after a moment's consideration, "that when a man wilfully embarks on the current which tends toward the Niagara cataract, it is his misfortune, and not his fault, if he finally finds himself at a point where the pressure of outward circumstance must needs carry him over the fall." "In that case," said the doctor, "the responsibility shifts back to the power that made the current and the fall, and put them in his way." Bergan saw the wide labyrinth of controversy opening before him, and tacitly declined to set foot in it. He was in no mood for polemics. He merely asked,-- "And in what way--if the question is admissible--do you find medicine more to your taste than the law?" "In medicine, there is always a distinct and a legitimate foe to combat--disease. When one engages in a hand-to-hand fight with a fever, there are no side issues. Nor does it matter in the least, whether battle is to be done over the body of an incarnate demon or an angel unfledged,--in both cases, the treatment is identical, the physician's duty the same."