DOCTOR. Ah, you think so! Well, you are wrong. Twenty cases identical with yours have been carefully observed—from the beginning to the end. Nineteen times—you hear, nineteen times in twenty—the woman was contaminated by her husband. You think that the danger is negligeable: you think you have the right to make your wife take her chance, as you said, of being one of the exceptions for which we can do nothing! Very well: then you shall know what you are doing. You shall know what sort of disease it is that your wife will have five chances per cent. of contracting without so much as having her leave asked. Take this book—it is my master’s work—here, read for yourself, I have marked the passage. You won’t read it? Then I will. [_He reads passionately_] ‘I have seen an unfortunate young woman changed by this disease into the likeness of a beast. The face, or I should rather say, what remained of it, was nothing but a flat surface seamed with scars.’ GEORGE. Stop, for pity’s sake, stop! DOCTOR. I shall not stop. I shall read to the end. I shall not refrain from doing right merely for fear of upsetting your nerves. [_He goes on_] ‘Of the upper lip, which had been completely eaten away, not a trace remained.’ There, that will do. And you are willing to run the risk of inflicting that disease on a woman whom you say you love, though you cannot support even the description of it yourself? And pray, from whom did that woman catch syphilis? It is not I who say all this: it is this book. ‘From a man whose criminal folly was such that he was not afraid to enter into marriage in an eruption, as was afterwards established, of marked secondary symptoms, and who had further thought fit not to have his wife treated for fear of arousing suspicion.’ What that man did is what you want to do. GEORGE. I should deserve all those names and worse still, if I were to be married with the knowledge that my marriage would bring about such horrors. But I do not believe that it would. You and your masters are specialists. Consequently you fix the whole of your attention on the subject of your studies, and you think that these dreadful, exceptional cases never have enough light thrown on them. They exercise a sort of fascination over you. DOCTOR. I know that argument. GEORGE. Let me go on, I beg. You have told me that one man in every seven is a syphilitic, and further that there are a hundred thousand such men going about the streets of Paris in perfect health.