DOCTOR [_rising_] No: I shall not see you next week, and what is more you will not think it over. You came here knowing what you had, with the express intention of not acting by my advice unless it agreed with your wishes. A flimsy honesty made you take this chance of pacifying your conscience. You wanted to have someone on whom you could afterwards throw the responsibility of an act you knew to be culpable. Don’t protest. Many who come here think as you think and do what you want to do. But when they have married in opposition to my advice the results have been for the most part so calamitous that now I am almost afraid of not having been persuasive enough. I feel as though in spite of everything I were in some sort the cause of their misery. I ought to be able to prevent such misery. If only the people who are the cause of it knew what I know and had seen what I have seen, it would be impossible. Give me your word that you will break off your engagement. GEORGE. I can’t give you my word. I can only repeat: I will think it over. DOCTOR. Think over what? GEORGE. What you have told me. DOCTOR. But what I have told you is true. You cannot make any fresh objections. I have answered those you have made. You must be convinced. GEORGE. Well, of course you are right in thinking that I posted myself up a bit before coming to see you. In the first place, is it certain that I have the disease you think? You say so, and perhaps it is true. But even the greatest doctors are sometimes deceived. Haven’t I heard that Ricord, your master, used to maintain that this disease was not always contagious? He produced cases to prove his point. Now you produce fresh cases to disprove it. Very well. But I have the right to think it over. And when I think it over, I realize the results you threaten me with are only probable. In spite of your desire to frighten me, you have been compelled to admit that my marriage will quite possibly produce no ill results for my wife. DOCTOR [_restraining himself with difficulty_] Go on. I will answer you. GEORGE. You tell me that your drugs are powerful, and that for the catastrophes you speak of to happen I must be one of the five exceptions per cent. you allow, and that my wife must be an exception too. Now, if a mathematician calculated the probabilities of the case, the chance of a catastrophe would prove so small that, when the slight probability of a disaster was set against the certainty of all the disappointments and the unhappiness and perhaps the tragedies which my breaking off the match would cause, he would undoubtedly come to the conclusion that I was right and you were wrong. After all, mathematics is more scientific than medicine.