he very second he became aware of its source. Don't you worry,
Doc. There won't be any noise in the papers."

"But leprosy! Public health! The dog has been exposed to his master.
The dog itself is a peripatetic source of infection."

"Contagion is the better and more technical word, Doc.," Walter Merritt
Emory soothed with the sting of superior knowledge.

"Contagion, then," Doctor Masters took him up. "The public must be
considered. It must not run the risk of being infected--"

"Of contracting the contagion," the other corrected smoothly.

"Call it what you will. The public--"

"Poppycock," said Walter Merritt Emory. "What you don't know about
leprosy, and what the rest of the board of health doesn't know about
leprosy, would fill more books than have been compiled by the men who
have expertly studied the disease. The one thing they have eternally
tried, and are eternally trying, is to inoculate one animal outside man
with the leprosy that is peculiar to man. Horses, rabbits, rats,
donkeys, monkeys, mice, and dogs--heavens, they have tried it on them
all, tens of thousands of times and a hundred thousand times ten thousand
times, and never a successful inoculation! They have never succeeded in
inoculating it on one man from another. Here--let me show you."

And from his shelves Waiter Merritt Emory began pulling down his
authorities.

"Amazing . . . most interesting . . . " Doctor Masters continued to emit
from time to time as he followed the expert guidance of the other through
the books. "I never dreamed . . . the amount of work they have done is
astounding . . . "

"But," he said in conclusion, "there is no convincing a layman of the
matter contained on your shelves. Nor can I so convince my public. Nor
will I try to. Besides, the man is consigned to the living death of life-
long imprisonment in the pest-house. You know the beastly hole it is. He
loves the dog. He's mad over it. Let him have it. I tell you it's
rotten unfair and cruel, and I won't stand for it."

"Yes, you will," Walter Merritt Emory assured him coolly. "And I'll tell
you why."

He told him. He said things that no doctor should say to another, but
which a politician may well say, and has often said, to another
politician--things which cannot bear repeating, if, for no other reason,
because they are too humiliating and too little conducive to pride for
the average American citizen to know; things of the inside, se