hy in hell's name didn't
I marry a girl who knew medicine? Don't you know that if a great chunk
of skin is burnt off anyone, more is grafted on?"

She nodded, her eyes wide with terror.

"Well, I'm telling you this now honestly. Presently I'll be lying
again. Marcella, I've to have will-power grafted on to me, and until I
have, I'm going to stay in bed. See?"

He was fumbling for his keys in his pockets. He gave them to her with
trembling hands. There was a flask of whisky untouched in his pocket,
and two empty ones. He threw them through the window regardless of
passers-by.

"Get out of here, Marcella, or look through the window a bit. I'm going
to get undressed and lock up all my things. I'm a filthy object. You
mustn't look at me till I've cleaned myself up. Then you must see that I
stay in bed till this hunger goes off. If I do that every time it comes
on--Lord, you always make me feel I want to wash myself in something
very big and clean, like the sea."

She turned to the glimmering window, feeling very humble. She felt that
she had let him down, somehow, in not being more wise. And yet she knew
very certainly that she was going to grope and grope now, hurting
herself and him until she did know.

"Why am I such a fool?" she asked, helplessly. The Morse lights winked
at her from the flagship and she got back the memory of a night many
years ago, when she had walked on Ben Grief with her mother just before
she was too ill to walk out any more. They had seen a ship winking so
that night, far out at sea, and it had passed silently. That night her
mother had talked of God's Fools and how they were the world's wisest
men.

"If you are not very wise, darling," her mother had said, "God has a
chance to use you better. It is so very hard for clever people to do
things for God, humbly--which is the only way--because they are egotists
wanting to show their own cleverness and not His all the time."

That night she had told Marcella the story of Parsifal, the "pure fool"
and how he, too big a fool to know his own name properly, had come to
the court of the king who was too ill to do anything, God's work or
man's.

"You see, this king had been given the sacred Spear. So long as he had
it no enemy could hurt him or his kingdom. But when he forgot, and
pleased himself just for a moment, the enemy got the Spear and wounded
him with it. No one could cure him till poor Parsifal came along--a
poor simpleton who had been br