WOMAN'S WORLD.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 84, 29 September 1911, Page 6

WOMAN'S WORLD.

(Conducted T>y "JLUeen"). they did not want children. a guml'se at the visitors to a doctor's coxsultixo room. In ii now book, ''The Dop Doctor," just issued, the writer, who writes with extraordinary varied knowledge and with vivid strokes, gives a glimpse into the life of a. West End doctor—quite a sideissue so far as the tale .is concerned — 'lxit what a revelation of social life today, it is told apropos of Mrs. Bough: '"She came punctual to the hour, and was shown into Owen's consulting-room —a little woman with beautiful, melancholy eyes and a. pretty figure. Illiterate, common, affected, and vain to a degree, hideously misusing the English language in that low, dulcet voice of hers, ludicrous in her 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, ami without shame. How should this little vulgar creature be expected to have more conscience than tiiev ?

"They beat about the bush longer, they put the thing more prettily. They spoke of their frail physical health and their husband's 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. Saxhum had such a great and justly earned'reputation in skilful and delicate operalions. . . . and. in short, would he

not bo compliant and oblige? They would pay tinytiiiug. Money was jio.sitively 110 object. ' "How many such tempting sirens sing in the ears of young, ri>ing professional men. wlio are hampered by lionorable debts which threaten to impede and drag them down; who are possessed of high ideals and moral sernpies, which, not being essentially fundamentally embedded and ingrained in the conscience of man. may possible 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 Snxham! * ''He heard this woman out, as he had heard all the others. He began us he had begun wjth every one of them—the delicate, titled aristocrats, the ambitious society beauties-, the popular actresses,; the women who envied them and read I about them in the illustrated interviews published in the fashion papers, and sigh-! Ed to be interviewed also —to not one j of these had he weighed out one drachm I less of the bitter salutary medicine that' he now administered to Mrs. Bough. j "He invariably began with the per-' sonal peril and the inevitable risk.' Strange how they" ignored it, , blinded i 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, was there? He could prescribe the kind of dose that ought to be taken, and everything would then be all right. "He would open that grim mouth of his yet again, and speak even more to the purpose. To these mothers who did not wish to be mothers, who threw the gift of heaven back in the face of heaven, preferring artificial barrenness to natural fecundity, and who made of their bodies, that should have brought forth healthy, wholesome sous and daughters of their race, tombs and sepulchres—to these he told the truth in swift, sharp, 'trenchant sentences that, like the keen sterilised blade of the surgical knife, cut to heal.

"WHon they argued with him, savin* that the thing was done, tli.it everybody knew that it was done, and that it always would be done, by other men as brilliant as, and less scrupulous than, the horoilist. he admitted the foree of

their arguments: Let other men of his great caning pile up anil amass wealth, if they chose, by tampering with the unclean thing. Owen Saxham would have none of it. "At this juncture the woman would have hysterics of the weeping or scolding kind, or would be convinced of the

righteousness of the forlorn cause lie championed, or would pretend the hysterics or the conviction. Generally she pretended to the Jatter. and swam or stumbled out, pulling down her veil to mask the rage and hatred in her haggard eyes, and went to that oilier man. "Then, after a brief absence, accounted for as a 'rest cure,' she would shine forth again upon her world, smiling, triumphant, prettier than ever, since she had begun to make up a little more. Or, as a woman who had passed through the Valley of the Shadow, with only her own rod and staff of vanity and pride to comfort her, she would emerge from that seclusion a nervous wreck, and take to pegging or chloral or spiritualism. ".Most rarely she would not emerge at all. and then her women friends would send wreaths for the coftin, and carriages to the funeral, and would whisper mysteriously together in their boudoirs, and look askance upon the doctor who had attended her. For. of course, he had bungled shockingly, or everything would have gone off as right as rain for that poor dear thing!"