et a grip on things and
be practical?"

Once more she was wide-awake, laughing with intense enjoyment.

"I can't see what there is to laugh at," he protested. "Marcella, has it
occurred to you what sort of heritage this kiddy of ours has?"

Purposely misunderstanding him she flung out both arms wide, to embrace
the whole of Australia, bush and forest, mountain, river and desert from
sea to sea.

"You know what I mean," he said desperately. "Me, his father, a
drunkard, with drink in his family, and you the descendant of dozens of
drunkards. And what's more, though you are not a drunkard, you're as mad
as a hatter. What the devil is the poor little beggar going to do?"

She was suddenly awake and very serious.

"Listen, Louis," she said, holding his hands very tight. "I got that
jerk-back most dreadfully in Sydney. Mrs. King was saying that the
crowning mercy of her life was the fact that she hadn't any children.
But it's a mad, bad, heretical sort of fear, the sort of heresy against
nature that people ought to be burnt at the stake for believing! This
child is no more your child and mine than Jesus was the child of Joseph
the carpenter, or--or Romulus and Remus were the children of the
wolf-mother. We've given him his flesh. We're his foster-parents, if you
like. But God and Humanity are his father and mother. I found all this
out one night on the roof in Sydney. He's a little bit of the spirit of
God incarnate for awhile."

"Keltic imagination," he said tentatively.

"Very well, then. If you don't like it my way, I'll put it in the
scientific way. You twitted me once for forgetting that biology applied
to us two. Doesn't it apply here? Biology shows that nature's pushing
out, paring down weaknesses and things that get in the way. If a
drunkard--who is a weakness, a scar on the face of nature--was going to
have drunkard babies, nature would make something happen to drunkards so
that they can't have children at all...."

"She does--in the last stages," murmured Louis.

"That's a good thing, perhaps. But I don't believe in inheriting things
like drinking. I don't believe my people inherited it at all. They
inherited a sort of temperament, perhaps--and it was the sort of
temperament that was accessible to drink-hunger. People talk about
drinking, or other weaknesses being in their families. Drinking seems to
be in most families nowadays, simply because people are slack and lazy
and drinking is the easiest and le