ed in love with him
already.

He was extraordinarily shy with and cynical about women. He had always
been detested by the servants at home--more or less unjustly. He spoke
to them abominably because he was frightened of their sex. Had he not
bullied them when he wanted small services performed, they never would
have been performed at all, for he would have had no courage to ask
civilly for anything. To his sister's friends when he was forced into
their company he was boorish, simply because girls put him into such a
panic of inferiority that, in self defence, he had to assert himself
unnaturally. Years ago his sister had refused to make one of a theatre
or concert party that included Louis; either he got drunk in the
interval and rejoined them later, making them conspicuous by his
behaviour, or else he sat at their side glowering and boorish, afraid
even to look at the players on the stage, too shy even to negotiate the
purchase of chocolates or programme. The last time he had been at the
theatre with his sister and Violet had been after a whole fortnight
without whisky. They were rather late; the play had begun. His sister
had whispered to him to get a programme. Afraid of being conspicuous he
had refused; she had ordered him to get it. People behind had hissed
"Hush" indignantly and finally Violet, with a contemptuous smile, had
bought programmes and chocolates for herself and the sister, cutting
Louis dead.

But whisky transformed him from a twitching neurotic into a
megalomaniac. He imagined that every woman he met was in love with him
indecently and physically; without whisky he saw women in veils and
shrouds; whisky made him see them with their clothes off, their eyes
full of lewd suggestion. Even to the elderly suburban ladies who visited
his mother he was tipsily improper. To find a girl like Marcella, who
did not put him either in a fever or a panic of sexuality was supremely
reassuring: she seemed to him like a nice man friend might be--though he
never had been able to acquire a man friend. He was intensely grateful
to her for marrying him: he was not her lover; he was her dependent: he
was treating her as he might have treated the old Dean at the hospital,
or as her father had treated God. But--his conventional sense told him
to kiss her and make her "just a girl."

He took both her hands in his and drew her towards him. Her eyes, which
began by being startled, grew suddenly soft, as his face came close to