s there? He could
prescribe the kind of dose that ought to be taken, and everything would
then be all right.

He would open that grim mouth of his yet again, and speak even more to the
purpose. To these mothers who did not wish to be mothers, who threw the
gift of Heaven back in the face of Heaven, preferring artificial
barrenness to natural fecundity, and who made of their bodies, that should
have brought forth healthy, wholesome sons and daughters of their race,
tombs and sepulchres--to these he told the truth, in swift, sharp,
trenchant sentences, that, like the keen sterilised blade of the surgical
knife, cut to heal. When they argued with him, saying that the thing was
done, that everybody knew it was done, and that it always would be done,
by other men as brilliant as, and less scrupulous than, the homilist; he
admitted the force of their arguments. Let other men of his great calling
pile up and amass wealth, if they chose, by tampering with the unclean
thing. Owen Saxham would none of it. At this juncture the woman would have
hysterics of the weeping or the scolding kind, or would be convinced of
the righteousness of the forlorn cause he championed, or would pretend the
hysterics or the conviction. Generally she pretended to the latter, and
swam or stumbled out, pulling down her veil to mask the rage and hatred in
her haggard eyes, and went to that other man. Then, after a brief absence
accounted for as a "rest cure," she would shine forth again upon her
world, smiling, triumphant, prettier than ever, since she had begun to
make up a little more. Or, as a woman who had passed through the Valley of
the Shadow, with only her own rod and staff of vanity and pride to comfort
her, she would emerge from that seclusion a nervous wreck, and take to
pegging or chloral or spiritualism. Most rarely she would not emerge at
all, and then her women friends would send wreaths for the coffin and
carriages to the funeral, and would whisper mysteriously together in their
boudoirs, and look askance upon the doctor who had attended her. For of
course he had bungled shockingly, or everything would have gone off as
right as rain for that poor dear thing!

Little Mrs. Bough was of the type of woman that pretends to be convinced.
She had cried bitterly in the beginning, as she confessed to Saxham that
she was not really married to Bough, and that the said Bough, whom Saxham
had always suspected of being a scoundrel, would certainly go o