GEORGE. You’re not going to tell me that it can be cured? DOCTOR. It can. GEORGE. And that I am not condemned to— DOCTOR. I give you my word on it. GEORGE. You’re not—you’re not making some mistake? I have been told— DOCTOR [_shrugging his shoulders_] You have been told! You have been told! No doubt you know all the ins and outs of the law of property. GEORGE. Yes, certainly; but I don’t see what connection— DOCTOR. Instead of being taught that, it would have been much better if you had been told the nature of the disease from which you are suffering. Then, perhaps, you would have been sufficiently afraid to avoid contracting it. GEORGE. But this woman was so—well, who could have thought such a thing of her? I didn’t take a woman off the streets, you know. She lives in the Rue de Berne—not exactly a low part of the town, is it? DOCTOR. The part of the town has nothing to do with it. This disease differs from many others; it has no preference for the unfortunate. GEORGE. But this woman lives almost straight. One of my chums has a mistress who’s a married woman. Well, it was a friend of hers. Her mother—she lives with her mother—was abroad at the time. At first she wouldn’t listen to me; then, finally, after I had spent a whole half-hour persuading her I had to promise her a ring like one of her friend’s before she would give way. She even made me take off my boots before going upstairs so that the porter mightn’t hear. DOCTOR. Well; if you had been taught, you would have known that these circumstances are no guarantee. GEORGE. That’s true; we ought to be taught. DOCTOR. Yes. GEORGE. At the same time it’s not a subject that can be broached in the papers. DOCTOR. Why not? GEORGE. I can speak of my own knowledge, for my father used to own a small provincial paper. If we had ever printed that word, the circulation would have dropped like a stone. DOCTOR. Yet you publish novels about adultery. GEORGE. Of course. That’s what the public wants. DOCTOR. You are right; it is the public that needs to be educated. A respectable man will take his wife and daughters to a music-hall, where they hear things to make a doctor blush. His modesty is only alarmed by serious words. GEORGE. And then, after all, what would one gain by being posted up about this disease? DOCTOR. If it were better understood it would be more often avoided. GEORGE. What one wants is some means of avoiding it altogether. DOCTOR. Oh! That is quite simple. GEORGE. Tell me. DOCTOR. It is no longer any concern of yours; but when you have a son you will be able to tell him what to do. GEORGE. What’s that? DOCTOR. To love only one woman, to be her first lover, and to love her so well that she will never be false to you. GEORGE. That’s easy, isn’t it! And if my son does not marry till he is twenty-eight, what then? DOCTOR. Then, that he may run the least risk, you will tell him to go to the licensed dealers— GEORGE. With a guarantee from the government.