Before this volley Stainton felt dismayed. "I had always thought," he said, "that this aim was excellent. Their purpose is the improvement of the race." "Purpose? But yes. Good. But their Nature, she makes only effects. How do they, my God, go to attain it, their purpose? By to make more good the chance now miserable of the oppressed to bring to life some strong sons and some robust daughters? _Jamais!_ Rather by to continue the present process of crowding to the grave the class that their class has made unfit, by to encourage breeding--million thunders, yes, among those very oppressors, truly, whose abuse of power already unfits _them_!" Stainton was a trifle nervous at the fear that the talk would soon turn to subjects of which a young wife is supposed to be ignorant. He glanced at Muriel, but he saw that she was engaged solely with the cut of _canard sauvage_ that lay on her plate, and he concluded that since she must some day learn of these things of which the doctor and he were talking, it was as well for her to learn of them from her husband and a physician. Nevertheless, he wavered. "I thought, doctor," he said, "that in France they offered money to the poor to increase the population?" The Frenchman's broad, pale lips smiled. He shrugged. "Money? My friend, as a man of affairs, you must know that one cannot say 'Money' but that one is asked: ''Ow much?' Attend well: In your country and in England these savants--name of God!--want what they call the best; in my country they want what they call the many. Do they this reconcile? I should be well amused to know the way." Dr. Boussingault leaned across the table and tapped Jim's wrist with an impressive forefinger. "In all the world, all, the only people that desire the poor to produce families, they are the _proprietaires_ and those lackeys of the _proprietaires_, the generals of the armies. The _proprietaire_ wants much workers, and he wants workers so bound by family 'responsibilities'"--the Frenchman hissed the s's of this word--"that they dare not revolt; he wants competition for the workers, for she lowers the wage. For the generals, all they want is more men to feed to the monster, War." "You must be a Socialist," smiled Stainton. "Socialist?" thundered the physician. "Never in life! Me, I am I: Boussingault, _medecin_!" "At any rate," said Stainton, "the world can't very well get along without children, you know." He was amazed at the doctor's manner: Boussingault would wave his arms and shout his words and then, when he had leaped to silence, relapse into a calm that seemed never to have been dispelled. Jim regarded the neighboring tables, but no one of the company there paid any attention to the commanding tones of the physician, probably because nearly all the guests of the restaurant were engaged in talk that was quite as violent as that of Paul Achille. Muriel might have been a thousand miles away. Now the word "children" again loosed the storm.