. I sometimes want to say something frightfully
charming to you, and don't for fear it's silly. I'm always wondering
what people will think of me--because I'm so often wrong, you know."

"I just don't care what anyone says or thinks," she broke in.

"There's the difference between us, then. Well, you see, being an
ordinary, average sort of human being, I think a lot about girls and all
that. Only deep down is the puritanical old idea that it's wicked to do
so. Really, honestly, Marcella, I'm not pulling your leg--when I first
started dissecting at the hospital, I felt horribly indecent. It was a
female thigh! I felt as if it ought to be clothed, somehow--I sort of
kept thinking the Pater or someone would come into the lab, and round on
me for being immoral. If it had been a male thigh I wouldn't have cared
a brass tanner!"

"It must be awful to have barriers in your mind," she pondered.

"It was just the same with booze. If I had a beer or a whisky in the
club as all the others did, I saw the Pater disembodied before me, and
had another to give me the courage necessary to face him. Everything,
you see, everything--girls, drink, curiosities, courtesies,
kindness--all got lumped together as things to keep in hand. I got in a
fever of self-consciousness. I do now. I think everyone is watching and
criticizing me. Then, you see, when I'm drunk, the watch I set on myself
is turned out to grass and I get a damned good rest. I let myself rip!
In my sober moments I daren't go and order tea for the Mater in a
bunshop because I'm petrified with terror of the waitress. When I'm
drunk I'd barge into a harem. That first affair--with the French
girl--was a tremendous thing to me. Most boys have played about with
that sort of thing before that age. They looked down on me because I
hadn't. But it made such a deep dint on my brain that whisky and sex and
French are all mixed up together and the one releases the other."

She sighed.

"I do wish Dr. Angus was here, Louis," she said. "I wish I understood
better."

"You understand better than Violet did. She used to stay at our place a
good deal, you know, and go with us to the seaside and to Scotland. Even
when I was right off whisky she used to drive me to it. Evening dress,
you know. Oh, frightfully _evening_! And--in a queer old place we stayed
in in Scotland once there were heaps of mice. She used to run out of her
room in the middle of the night saying she was frightened of them