being, much as he liked to be near her.  He had, even through his self-satisfied alcohol dream, seen her disgusted looks at Naples when he had spoken to her.  He guessed that the sort of half-maudlin love-making that had won Violet would never suit Marcella.  And he knew beyond the shadow of doubt that no power on earth save whisky could ever get him to make love to anything—­even a young girl who seemed in love with him already.

He was extraordinarily shy with and cynical about women.  He had always been detested by the servants at home—­more or less unjustly.  He spoke to them abominably because he was frightened of their sex.  Had he not bullied them when he wanted small services performed, they never would have been performed at all, for he would have had no courage to ask civilly for anything.  To his sister’s friends when he was forced into their company he was boorish, simply because girls put him into such a panic of inferiority that, in self defence, he had to assert himself unnaturally.  Years ago his sister had refused to make one of a theatre or concert party that included Louis; either he got drunk in the interval and rejoined them later, making them conspicuous by his behaviour, or else he sat at their side glowering and boorish, afraid even to look at the players on the stage, too shy even to negotiate the purchase of chocolates or programme.  The last time he had been at the theatre with his sister and Violet had been after a whole fortnight without whisky.  They were rather late; the play had begun.  His sister had whispered to him to get a programme.  Afraid of being conspicuous he had refused; she had ordered him to get it.  People behind had hissed “Hush” indignantly and finally Violet, with a contemptuous smile, had bought programmes and chocolates for herself and the sister, cutting Louis dead.

But whisky transformed him from a twitching neurotic into a megalomaniac.  He imagined that every woman he met was in love with him indecently and physically; without whisky he saw women in veils and shrouds; whisky made him see them with their clothes off, their eyes full of lewd suggestion.  Even to the elderly suburban ladies who visited his mother he was tipsily improper.  To find a girl like Marcella, who did not put him either in a fever or a panic of sexuality was supremely reassuring:  she seemed to him like a nice man friend might be—­though he never had been able to acquire a man friend.  He was intensely grateful to her for marrying him:  he was not her lover; he was her dependent:  he was treating her as he might have treated the old Dean at the hospital, or as her father had treated God.  But—­his conventional sense told him to kiss her and make her “just a girl.”