“Well, I can’t say he does; but the experiment is a very interesting one, and I am getting up a good paper on it. I shall not keep him in much longer, for I have nearly completed my investigations. This is the best case on which I have tried the treatment. I have lost three others, but I think this one will do well.” And thus the days went by. To a man who loved his work as our hero loved it, there was hourly something fresh to interest and excite speculation. But the atmosphere of the place was beginning to tell upon him. The utterly reckless, matter-of-course way in which experiments were tried upon the occupants of the beds; tried by everybody concerned, from the chief to the dresser; tried by the performance of operations of terrible gravity on those who, at longest, had but a few weeks to live; down to the snipping off little mites of skin from the arms of one person to “graft” on the wounds of another, had tended to blunt Elsworth’s fine sense of humanity and lower his ideal. Not that anybody about the place ever suggested that all this was wrong; nobody, except now and then a patient or his friends, expressed any objection to a course so fraught with information and dexterity of hand. It all seemed the most natural thing possible, and the hospital system as perfect as could be imagined. Outside “some sentimentalists, weak-brained lords and hysterical women,” as they were termed by the men of science, were making a noise over these very things—were threatening to withdraw their subscriptions, indeed; but nothing ever came of their agitation, and the greater public was too well convinced of the perfection of the system to interfere with it. “How is a medical man to learn his business if he does not pick it up at the hospital?” asked a noble lord of a friend the other day. The reply was a sensible one. “I don’t know, but I fancy these confounded Socialist fellows will put a stop to all this sort of thing before the world is much older.” Quite so. The mob did not like Marie Antoinette’s carriages to run over them in the streets of Paris just because they were only _canaille_. Our Radical friends have not found out just yet how we run over them scientifically. When they do, be sure they will find their remedy. CHAPTER X. THE NEW MORALITY. Our mistress is a little given to philosophy: what disputations shall we have here by-and-by!—_Gil Blas._ They add up nature to a nought of God And cross the quotient. —_Elizabeth Barrett Browning._ Voilà de l’erudition.—_Les Femmes Savantes._