Homer Wells had no doubts to soften his contempt for people who’d bungled their lives so badly that they didn’t want the children they’d conceived. Wilbur Larch would have told him that he was simply an arrogant, young doctor who’d never been sick—that he was guilty of a young doctor’s disease, manifesting a sick superiority toward all patients. But Homer was wielding an ideal of marriage and family like a club; he was more sure of the rightness of his goal than a couple celebrating their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary.
