started
with, Prothero's impossibility.

"What does he do for it?" he repeated. "He knows the consequences as
well as I do."

Laura said she didn't think that Owen ever had considered consequences.

"But he _must_ consider them. What's a set of verses compared with his
health?"

Laura answered quietly, "Owen would say what was his health compared
with a set of verses? If he knew they'd be the greatest poem of his
life."

"His life? My dear child----"

The pause was terrible.

"I wish," he said, "we could get him out of this."

"He doesn't want to go. You said yourself it wasn't the great thing."

He admitted it. The great thing, he reiterated, was rest. It was his one
chance. He explained carefully again how good a chance it was. He dwelt
on the things Prothero might yet do if he gave himself a chance. And
when he had done talking Laura remarked that it was all very well, but
he was reckoning without Owen's genius.

"Genius?" He shrugged his shoulders. He smiled (as if they weren't
always reckoning with it at Putney!). "What is it? For medicine it's
simply and solely an abnormal activity of the brain. And it must stop."

He stood over her impressively, marking his words with clenched fist on
open palm.

"He must choose between his genius and his life."

She winced. "I don't believe he _can_ choose," she murmured. "It _is_
his life."

He straightened himself to his enormous height, in dignified recoil from
her contradiction.

"I have known many men of genius," he said.

"His genius is different," said she.

He hadn't the heart to say what he had always said, that Prothero's
genius was and always had been most peculiarly a disease; but he did
not shrink from telling her that at the present crisis it was death.

For he was angry now. He could not help being moved by professional
animus, the fury of a man who has brought his difficult, dangerous work
to the pitch of unexpected triumph, and sees it taken from his hands and
destroyed for a perversity, an incomprehensible caprice.

He was still more deeply stirred by his compassion, his affection for
the Protheros. Secretly, he was very fond of Owen, though the poet _was_
impossible; he was even more fond of little Laura. He did not want to
see her made a widow because Prothero refused to control his vice. For
the literary habit, indulged in to that extent, amounted to a vice. The
Doctor had no patience with it. A man was not, after all, a slave to hi