d saw
you just now, I wondered how you could come here coolly to look at his
pictures. You answered the question. To you, he was only a clever brute.

RIDGEON [quivering] Oh, dont. You know I did not know you were here.

JENNIFER [raising her head a little with a quite gentle impulse of
pride] You think it only mattered because I heard it. As if it could
touch me, or touch him! Dont you see that what is really dreadful is
that to you living things have no souls.

RIDGEON [with a sceptical shrug] The soul is an organ I have not come
across in the course of my anatomical work.

JENNIFER. You know you would not dare to say such a silly thing as that
to anybody but a woman whose mind you despise. If you dissected me you
could not find my conscience. Do you think I have got none?

RIDGEON. I have met people who had none.

JENNIFER. Clever brutes? Do you know, doctor, that some of the dearest
and most faithful friends I ever had were only brutes! You would have
vivisected them. The dearest and greatest of all my friends had a sort
of beauty and affectionateness that only animals have. I hope you may
never feel what I felt when I had to put him into the hands of men who
defend the torture of animals because they are only brutes.

RIDGEON. Well, did you find us so very cruel, after all? They tell me
that though you have dropped me, you stay for weeks with the Bloomfield
Boningtons and the Walpoles. I think it must be true, because they never
mention you to me now.

JENNIFER. The animals in Sir Ralph's house are like spoiled children.
When Mr. Walpole had to take a splinter out of the mastiff's paw, I had
to hold the poor dog myself; and Mr Walpole had to turn Sir Ralph out
of the room. And Mrs. Walpole has to tell the gardener not to kill wasps
when Mr. Walpole is looking. But there are doctors who are naturally
cruel; and there are others who get used to cruelty and are callous
about it. They blind themselves to the souls of animals; and that blinds
them to the souls of men and women. You made a dreadful mistake about
Louis; but you would not have made it if you had not trained yourself
to make the same mistake about dogs. You saw nothing in them but dumb
brutes; and so you could see nothing in him but a clever brute.

RIDGEON [with sudden resolution] I made no mistake whatever about him.

JENNIFER. Oh, doctor!

RIDGEON [obstinately] I made no mistake whatever about him.

JENNIFER. Have you forgotten that he died?