"Well, ask her and tell her, too; they go together!" "Is it possible! I'm always glad to learn!" "Then, how old must he be?" "Well, if you stand in need of the opinion of an experienced physician, as soon as he learns to speak would be about the right period! That would be the safest age! The patient would then have leisure to consider his case before being affected by the disease. You could have time to get singed and step away gradually instead of being roasted alive all at once. Does that sound hard?" "Not very! Do you love a girl longer if you tell her or if you don't tell her?" "I'm afraid nobody has ever tried _both_ ways! Suppose you try both, and let us have the benefit of your experience." "Well, then, if you love, do you love forever?" The doctor laughed nervously and tightened his arms around the innocent. "Nobody has lived forever yet--nobody knows!" "But forever while you live--do you love as long as that?" "You wouldn't know until you were dead and then it would be too late to report. But aren't you doing a good deal of hard fighting this morning,--on soft-boiled eggs,--though I think the victory is yours, General, the victory is truly and honestly yours!" "I can't stop thinking, can I? You don't expect me to stop thinking, do you, when I'm just beginning really to think?" "Very well, then, we won't say anything more about thinking." "Then do you or don't you?" "Now, what are you trying to talk about?" demanded the doctor angrily, and as if on instant guard. A new hatred seemed coming to life in him; there was a burning flash of it in his eyes. "Just between ourselves--suppose that when I am a man and after I have been married to Elizabeth awhile, I get tired of her and want a little change. And I fell in love with another man's wife and dared not tell her, because if I did I might get a bullet through me; would I love the other man's wife more because I could not tell her, or would I love her more because I told her and risked the bullet?" Pall-like silence draped the room, thick, awful silence. The father lifted his son from his lap to the floor, and turned him squarely around and looked him in the eyes imperiously. Many a time with some such screened but piercing power he, as a doctor, had scrutinized the faces of children to see whether they were aware that some vast tragedy of life was in the room with them. To keep them from knowing had often been his main care; seeing them know had been life's last pity; young children finding out the tragedies of their parents with one another--so many kinds of tragedies. "You had better go now," he urged gently. Then an idea clamped his brain in its vise. "And remember: while you are over there, you must try to behave with your best manners because you are going to stay in the house of a great lady. All the questions that you want to ask, ask me when you come back. Ask _me_!"