The older one had abandoned me because of my lack of money. The younger one still liked me, but I had absolutely no use for her and brutally told her so to her face. She cried openly on the street, but then she got the point and retreated. I never heard from her again.

By chance I ran into an acquaintance, a former classmate. At one time he had been among the least talented people in the class, but he had been the quickest to make a career for himself, was codirector of a chemical plant that produced medicines. Hair restorers, calcium supplements, rejuvenation tonics. He ran an experimental laboratory in a distant city. He made me an offer.

That evening I wrote to my wife again. I suggested to her that we put an amicable end to the marriage, inasmuch as it was wearing the two of us down both physically and mentally. Instead of replying, she came herself. She had received this letter “by accident,” she said, the earlier ones having been kept from her by her daughter. She was agitated, fearful. Clear signs of physical decline could no longer be ignored. Occasionally she clutched her heart with her heavily beringed, wizened hand (no one yet knows how to enamel hands). It flashed through my mind how happy both of us would be if she met with a painless death that day or next. Her varicose veins were giving her trouble. A small venous blood clot had once come loose and made its way from the lower leg to the brain. She doubted whether she would ever be quite well again. She was afraid to have an operation, perhaps because my example had proven to her that doctors are not infallible gods. Yes, nothing less than that. Through a curious association of ideas, there came into my mind the peculiar action that I had observed as the effect of Toxin Y, the toxic substance in crystalline form that I had obtained from scarlet-fever cultures: similar abnormal clotting phenomena, producing sudden death–a pulmonary embolism, a heart attack, a stroke–in experimental animals. It was a possibility. They had not suffered. I believe.

On some pretext, it was late afternoon, I disengaged myself from my wife, who was exhausted from her journey and from being overwrought. She tried to stop me. She wanted to tell me all about how her daughter and her husband had threatened to have her declared legally incompetent and her property confiscated if she did not leave me. She tried to throw her pale arms around me. I escaped with some effort.

The domestics had not been paid and the landlord had not received the rent. I had to get away from these disagreeable confrontations with my wife. My clinic was almost entirely empty.