They entered a room whose doors and windows were muffled. The furniture was solid, too solid to be moved except by muscular arms.

On the bed lay a woman with ragged hair and sunken yellow face, but even in her ruin indefinably elegant. Her parted lips were black and blistered within; her shapely, skinny hands clutched the quilt with the tenacious suggestion of the eagle—that long-lived defiant bird. At the bedside sat a vigorous woman, the pallor of fatigue on her face.

“Give me a drink,” she said feverishly. “Water! water! water!” She panted, and her tongue protruded slightly. Her husband turned away, his shoulders twitching. The nurse held a silver goblet to the woman’s lips. She drank greedily, then scowled up at the doctor.

“You missed it,” she said. “I should be glad, for I hate you, only you give me more relief than they. They are afraid. They tried to fool me, the idiots! But they didn’t try it twice. I bit.”

She laughed and threw her arms above her head. The loose sleeves of her gown fell back, disclosing arms speckled as from an explosion of gunpowder.

“Just an ordinary morphine fiend,” thought the doctor. “And she is the wife of John Schuyler!”

An hour after dinner he told the husband and nurse to go to bed. For a while he read, the woman sleeping profoundly. The house was absolutely still. Had pandemonium reigned he could hardly have heard of it from this isolated room. Despite the stillness, the doctor had to strain his ear to catch the irregular breathing of the sick woman. He had a singular feeling, although the most unimaginative of men, that this third floor, containing only himself and the woman, had been sliced from the rest of the house and hung suspended in space, independent of natural laws. Then the idea shaped itself, born of another, as yet unacknowledged, skulking in the recesses of his brain. Going to the bed, he looked down upon the woman, coldly, reflectively—exactly as he had often watched the quivering of an animal—dissected alive.

Studying this man’s face, it was impossible to imagine it agitated by any passion except thirst for knowledge. The skin was as white as marble; the profile was straight and mathematical, the mouth a straight line, the chin as square as that of a chiselled Fate. The jaw was prominent, powerful, relentless. The eyes were deeply set and grey as polished steel. The large brow was luminous, very full—an index to the terrible intellect of the man.

As he looked down on the woman his nostrils twitched, and his lips compressed firmly. Then he smiled. It was an odd, almost demoniacal smile.

“A physician,” he said half aloud, “has almost as much power as God. The idea strikes me that we are the personification of that useful symbol.”

He plunged his hands into his pockets, and walked up and down the room.

“These are the facts in the case,” he continued. “The one man I love and unequivocally respect is tied, hand and foot, to that unsexed dehumanised morphine receptacle on the bed. She is hopeless. Every known specific has failed, must fail, for she loves the vice. He has one of the best brains of this day prolific in brains; a distressing capacity for affection, human to the core. At the age of forty-two, in the maturity of his mental powers, he carries with him a constant sickening sense of humiliation; a proud man, he lives in daily fear of exposure and shame. At the age of forty-two, in the maturity of his manhood, he meets the woman who conquers his heart, his imagination, by making other women abhorrent to him, who allures and maddens with the certainty of her power to make good his ideal of her. He cannot marry her; that animal on the bed is capable of living for twenty years.