It was doubtful whether, having been thus exposed and made bankrupt, I could ever again obtain a respectable practice.

Indeed, the most that I might hope for would be some small appointment on the west coast of Africa, or any other poisonous place, which no one else would be inclined to accept, where I might live--until I died.
The question that occurred to me that evening was whether it would not be wiser on the whole to accept defeat, own myself beaten, and ring down the curtain--not a difficult matter for a doctor to deal with.

The arguments for such a course were patent; what were those against it?
The existence of my child?
Well, by the time that she grew up, if she lived to grow up, all the trouble and scandal would be forgotten, and the effacement of a discredited parent could be no great loss to her.
Moreover, my life was insured for 3000 pounds in an office that took the risk of suicide.
Considerations of religion?
These had ceased to have any weight with me.
I was brought up to believe in a good and watching Providence, but the events of the last few months had choked that belief.

If there was a God who guarded us, why should He have allowed the existence of my wife to be sacrificed to the carelessness, and all my hopes to the villainy, of Sir John Bell?
The reasoning was inconclusive, perhaps--for who can know the ends of the Divinity ?--but it satisfied my mind at the time, and for the rest I have never really troubled to reopen the question.
The natural love of life for its own sake?
It had left me.

What more had life to offer?
Further, what is called "love of life" frequently enough is little more than fear of the hereafter or of death, and of the physical act of death I had lost my terror, shattered as I was by sorrow and shame.