DOCTOR. You do not consider that in doing so you will publicly acknowledge that your daughter has been exposed to the infection. The statement will be officially registered in the papers of the case. Do you suppose that after that your daughter is likely to find a second husband? LOCHES. She will never marry again. DOCTOR. She says so now. Can you be sure that she will say so in five or in ten years time? Besides, you will not obtain a divorce, because I shall not furnish you with the necessary proof. LOCHES. I shall find other ways to establish it. I shall have the child examined by another doctor. DOCTOR. Indeed! You think that this poor little thing has not been unlucky enough in her start in life? She has been blighted physically: you wish besides to stamp her indelibly with the legal proof of congenital syphilis? LOCHES. So when the victims seek to defend themselves they are struck still lower! So the law provides no arms against the man who takes an innocent, confiding young girl in sound health, knowingly befouls her with the heritage of his debauchery, and makes her mother of a wretched mite whose future is such that those who love it most do not know whether they had better pray for its life or for its immediate deliverance! This man has inflicted on his wife the supreme insult, the most odious degradation. He has, as it were, thrust her into contact with the streetwalker with whose vice he is stained, and created between her and that common thing a bond of blood to poison herself and her child. Thanks to him, this abject creature, this prostitute, lives our life, makes one of our family, sits down with us at table. He has smirched my daughter’s imagination as he has tarnished her body, and bound up for ever in her mind the ideal of love that she placed so high with heaven knows what horrors of the hospital. He has struck her physically and morally, in her dignity and her modesty, in her love and in her child. He has hurled her into the depths of shame. And the state of law and opinion is such that this woman cannot be separated from this man save at the cost of a scandal which will overwhelm herself and her child. Very well, then, I shall not ask the aid of the law. Last night I wondered if it was not my duty to go and shoot down that brute like a mad dog. It was cowardice that prevented me. Weakly I proposed to invoke the law. Well, since the law will not do justice, I will take it into my own hands. Perhaps his death will serve as a warning to others. DOCTOR [_putting aside his hat_] You will be tried for your life. LOCHES. And I shall be acquitted.