your desire to terrify me, you have been forced to admit that
possibly my marriage would not have any troublesome consequence
for my wife."

The doctor found difficulty in restraining himself. But he said,
"Go on. I will answer you afterwards."

And George blundered ahead in his desperation. "Your remedies
are powerful, you tell me; and for the calamities of which you
speak to befall me, I would have to be among the rare
exceptions--also my wife would have to be among the number of
those rare exceptions. If a mathematician were to apply the law
of chance to these facts, the result of his operation would show
but slight chance of a catastrophe, as compared with the absolute
certainty of a series of misfortunes, sufferings, troubles,
tears, and perhaps tragic accidents which the breaking of my
engagement would cause. So I say that the mathematician--who is,
even more than you, a man of science, a man of a more infallible
science--the mathematician would conclude that wisdom was not
with you doctors, but with me."

"You believe it, sir!" exclaimed the other. "But you deceive
yourself." And he continued, driving home his point with a
finger which seemed to George to pierce his very soul. "Twenty
cases identical with your own have been patiently observed, from
the beginning to the end. Nineteen times the woman was infected
by her husband; you hear me, sir, nineteen times out of twenty!
You believe that the disease is without danger, and you take to
yourself the right to expose your wife to what you call the
chance of your being one of those exceptions, for whom our