I shall take less time to die, for the same reason.' Severi was very quiet about it; but the Mother Superior turned on him suddenly from the window, her small face very white.
'It is suicide,' she said--'deliberate, intentional suicide, and no right-thinking man, priest or layman, would call it by any other name, let Doctor Pieri say what he will! You are in full possession of your senses, and even of your health and strength, at this moment, and you are assured that you run no risk if you submit to the doctors, but that if you will not you must die! You are choosing death where you can choose life, and that is suicide if anything is! Doctor Pieri knows well enough what a good priest would say, and so do I, who have been a nurse for a quarter of a century! If the injury were internal, and if there were a real risk to your life in operating, you would have the right, the moral right, to choose between the danger of dying under ether and the comparative certainty of dying of the injury.

But this is a specific case.

You are young, strong, absolutely healthy, and the chance of your dying from the anaesthetic is not one in thousands, whereas, if nothing is done, death is certain.

I ask you, before God and man and on your honour, whether you do not know that you are committing suicide--nothing less than cowardly, dastardly self-murder!' 'If I am, it is my affair,' answered Giovanni coldly; 'but you need not leave out the rest.

You believe that if I choose to die I shall go straight to everlasting punishment.