LUCIE. As the result, you mean, of their father’s intemperance? Our own doctor and another besides have already told me the same thing. HOURTIN. They should have begun by telling M. Brignac. LUCIE. They did. HOURTIN. Well? LUCIE. He listened no more to them than he did to you. HOURTIN. Is he not fond of the children? LUCIE. In his own way he is. But he will never change his way of living. HOURTIN. So much the worse for him. LUCIE. He did try once. He was incapable of work and became sad, weak, restless. HOURTIN. Like a morphinomaniac deprived of his drug. LUCIE. To his mind the experiment was decisive. He simply cannot study a brief or speak in court without the help of his usual stimulant. He thinks it does him no harm. HOURTIN. He has only to look at the children. LUCIE. What he says is that at their age he had nervous convulsions, and that now he is perfectly well. HOURTIN. Precisely. He received from his father a legacy that he has transmitted to them in a graver degree. His father drank, but his life was the healthy, active, open air life of a peasant, and his power of resistance greater because he probably did not inherit a morbid tendency. Your husband’s life is sedentary and feverish. Moreover, he does inherit the tendency. You tell me that he had convulsions in infancy; yesterday he said he was a backward child. These are symptoms just as much as his desire for drink and his irritability. He had a taint at birth that he has increased. His children suffer from a cumulative degeneracy. The grandfather drank, the son suffers from alcoholism, the children are nervous invalids. LUCIE. Horrible. HOURTIN. You must use all your influence with your husband to cure him. LUCIE. He won’t listen to me. HOURTIN. You must insist. You must make him see his duty as a father. LUCIE. It would be so useless that I shall not even try. HOURTIN [_rising_] Then I have only one further piece of advice for you both: don’t have any more children. LUCIE. No more children? HOURTIN. No. LUCIE. Why not? HOURTIN. Because it is to be feared that any you might now have would be more diseased than the first. LUCIE. Is that certain? HOURTIN. In medicine there are no certainties; only probabilities. The chances are, perhaps, five to one that I am right. Would you venture to give any creature so doubtful an existence? LUCIE. I! No, indeed. Most likely you have said as much to my husband. Won’t he believe you?