ipped and failed and was fighting himself back again, she
felt that she was getting bankrupt. One could never treat Louis by rule
of thumb. He might get drunk if she inadvertently spoke coolly to him.
Then he would get drunk out of pique. He might get drunk if she had been
especially loving. _Then_ it would be because he was happy and wanted to
celebrate; if she were ill he would get drunk to drown his anxiety: if
she got better, he would drink to show his relief; if she died, he would
drown his grief. Sometimes she felt that it was quite impossible to
safeguard him: she literally had not the knowledge. Such knowledge was
locked away in a few wise brains like Kraill's--and meanwhile people
were rotting. Once she wrote a long letter to Carnegie asking him to
stop giving money for libraries and spend some on helping to cure
neurotics. But she destroyed the letter, and went on hoping. Sometimes
she felt that her body would either get out of hand as Louis's did, or
else crack under the strain put upon it by her temperament, Louis and
her work. Sometimes she thought her capacity for happiness would atrophy
and drop off if she so defiantly kept it pushed into a dark corner of
her being every time it protested to her that it was being starved.
Sometimes she hoped that the time would come quickly when she would have
killed desire for everything as Aunt Janet had done, and would be going
about the world a thing stuffed with cotton-wool, armoured in
cotton-wool. And all the time she was fighting the insidious temptation
to kill the unconscious aristocracy of her that had, after the first few
weeks in Sydney, set a barrier between her and Louis--a barrier of which
he was never once conscious. Other people, on a lower range of life,
seemed quite happy with a few thunder flashes of passion in a grey sky.
Louis did. Except when the end of the month brought pay day, and set him
itching to be off to the township, he seemed happy. At these times she
deliberately made love to him to hold him from the whisky, loathing the
deliberateness and expediency of a thing which, it seemed to her, ought
to be a spontaneous swelling of a wave until it burst overwhelmingly.
She did not realize until long afterwards what good discipline this was,
as her brain and spirit refused to follow her body along a meaner path.
Louis never guessed how she thought out calmly whether to be hurt or not
by him, and decided that it was better to be a wounded thing hiding