JENNIFER. He looked the picture of health and strength and prosperity. [She looks for a moment at the walls, contrasting Blenkinsop's fortune with the artist's fate]. RIDGEON [in low tones, still embarrassed] He has been fortunate. JENNIFER. Very fortunate. His life has been spared. RIDGEON. I mean that he has been made a Medical Officer of Health. He cured the Chairman of the Borough Council very successfully. JENNIFER. With your medicines? RIDGEON. No. I believe it was with a pound of ripe greengages. JENNIFER [with deep gravity] Funny! RIDGEON. Yes. Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. JENNIFER. Dr Blenkinsop said one very strange thing to me. RIDGEON. What was that? JENNIFER. He said that private practice in medicine ought to be put down by law. When I asked him why, he said that private doctors were ignorant licensed murderers. RIDGEON. That is what the public doctor always thinks of the private doctor. Well, Blenkinsop ought to know. He was a private doctor long enough himself. Come! you have talked at me long enough. Talk to me. You have something to reproach me with. There is reproach in your face, in your voice: you are full of it. Out with it. JENNIFER. It is too late for reproaches now. When I turned and saw you just now, I wondered how you could come here coolly to look at his pictures. You answered the question. To you, he was only a clever brute. RIDGEON [quivering] Oh, dont. You know I did not know you were here. JENNIFER [raising her head a little with a quite gentle impulse of pride] You think it only mattered because I heard it. As if it could touch me, or touch him! Dont you see that what is really dreadful is that to you living things have no souls. RIDGEON [with a sceptical shrug] The soul is an organ I have not come across in the course of my anatomical work. JENNIFER. You know you would not dare to say such a silly thing as that to anybody but a woman whose mind you despise. If you dissected me you could not find my conscience. Do you think I have got none? RIDGEON. I have met people who had none. JENNIFER. Clever brutes? Do you know, doctor, that some of the dearest and most faithful friends I ever had were only brutes! You would have vivisected them. The dearest and greatest of all my friends had a sort of beauty and affectionateness that only animals have. I hope you may never feel what I felt when I had to put him into the hands of men who defend the torture of animals because they are only brutes. RIDGEON. Well, did you find us so very cruel, after all? They tell me that though you have dropped me, you stay for weeks with the Bloomfield Boningtons and the Walpoles. I think it must be true, because they never mention you to me now.