e he's grown up maybe Kraill's socialization of
knowledge will have begun."

Marcella was having an argument with Mrs. Beeton that day when Jerry
brought the letter in. Mrs. Beeton seemed to think it was necessary to
have an oven, a pastry board, a roller and various ingredients before
one could attempt jam tarts. Marcella felt that a mixture of flour,
fruit salt, and water baked in the clay oven heaped over with blazing
wood ought to beat Mrs. Beeton at her own game. She and young Andrew,
both covered in flour because he loved to smack his hands in it and
watch it rise round them in curly white clouds were watching beside the
fire for the sticks to burn down. When she read the doctor's letter she
sat down immediately to write to him. She knew so well that sense of
inadequacy that trying to help Louis always gave her, and she wanted to
cure him of it. The jam tarts got burned; she forgot about them. It was
only when she remembered that the letter could not go to the post for
three days that she decided to write it again at greater leisure.

The two years had aged Marcella; the doctor's letters were manna in the
desert to her spirit, his books the only paths out of the hard, tough
life of everyday. Sometimes she felt tempted to take the cheap thrills
of purely physical existence with Louis as she realized more and more
that, though his schooled and trained brain was a better machine than
hers, his soul was a weak plant requiring constant cossetting and
feeding while his body was the unreasoning, struggling home of
appetites. She had the torturing hopefulness that comes from alternating
failure and success in a dear project; she was getting just a little
cynical about him; her clear brain saw that she was his mother, his
nurse and, perhaps, his mistress. He loved her. She knew that quite
well. But he loved her as so many Christians love Christ--"because He
died for us." His love was unadulterated selfishness even though it was
the terribly pathetic selfishness of a weak thing seeking prop and
salvation. She faced quite starkly the fact that her love was a love of
giving always, receiving never; also she faced the fact that she must
kill every weakness in herself, for, by letting him see her hardness,
she gave him something to imitate. Hunger of soul, the black depression
that comes to a Kelt like a breath from the grave, weariness of body
must all be borne gallantly lest he be "raked up." Once or twice, when
Louis had sl