application of the debatable aspirate to words in the
spelling of which it has no part.

Rather an absurd little person, Mrs. Bough. Yet, a tragic little person,
in Saxham's eyes at least, by the time she had made her errand plain.

He heard her tell the tale that was not new to him. Cultured, highly-bred
women had made such appeals to him before, and without shame. How should
this little vulgar creature be expected to have more conscience than they?

They beat about the bush longer, they put the thing more prettily. They
spoke of their frail physical health and their husbands' great anxiety,
and quoted the long-ago expressed opinion of ancient family physicians,
who possibly turned uneasily in their decent graves. But the gist of the
whole was, that they did not want children, and Dr. Saxham had such a
great and justly-earned reputation in skilful and delicate operations ...
and, in short, would he not be compliant and oblige? They would pay
anything. Money was positively no object.

How many such tempting sirens sing in the ears of young, rising
professional men, who are hampered by honourable debts which threaten to
impede and drag them down; who are possessed of high ideals and moral
scruples, which, not being essentially, fundamentally embedded and
ingrained in the conscience of the man, may possibly be argued away; who
have not implanted in their souls and hearts the high reverence for
motherhood and the deep tenderness for helpless infancy that distinguished
Owen Saxham!

He heard this woman out, as he had heard all the others. He began as he
had begun with every one of them--the delicate, titled aristocrats, the
ambitious Society beauties, the popular actresses, the women who envied
these and read about them in the illustrated interviews published in the
fashion-papers, and sighed to be interviewed also--to not one of these had
he weighed out one drachm less of the bitter salutary medicine that he now
administered to Mrs. Bough.

He invariably began with the personal peril and the inevitable risk.
Strange how they ignored it, blinded themselves to it, thrust it, the
grinning, threatening Death's-head, on one side. Of course, he talked like
that! It was most candid of him, and most conscientious. But if they were
willing to take the risk--and antiseptic surgery had made such _huge_
strides in these days that the risk was a mere nothing.... Besides, there
was not really need for anything like an operation, wa