She sighed.

“I do wish Dr. Angus was here, Louis,” she said.  “I wish I understood better.”

“You understand better than Violet did.  She used to stay at our place a good deal, you know, and go with us to the seaside and to Scotland.  Even when I was right off whisky she used to drive me to it.  Evening dress, you know.  Oh, frightfully evening!  And—­in a queer old place we stayed in in Scotland once there were heaps of mice.  She used to run out of her room in the middle of the night saying she was frightened of them.  And then I had to carry her back, and rub her feet because they’d got cold.  She was rather a maddening sort of person, you know.  She’d lead one on to biting one’s nails and tearing one’s hair and then she’d laugh and kiss her hand and run away with my sister into her bedroom.  And they’d both laugh.  She understood the value of being a woman, did Violet.  And she didn’t let herself go cheap—­I used to get the key of the tantalus and cart a whole decanter of whisky to bed to get over it.  If she’d just have let me kiss her—­”

He paused, frowning reminiscently.

Marcella sighed, and laid a cool, firm hand on Louis’s.

“Louis—­I think I’m—­cheap.”

“So are air and water, dearie,” he cried, with sudden passion that surprised her.

“I don’t think I’ll ever understand men, though.  Wine, women and song they seem to lump together into a sort of tolerated degradation.”

“I don’t know much about song, but women and wine are certainly to be lumped together.  They’re both an uncontrollable hunger.  And they give you a thick head afterwards!  You say that Professor chap in his lectures resents women.  Of course he does.  Don’t you think I resent whisky?  Wouldn’t any man resent the thing that makes dints in him, makes him undignified, body and soul, and gives him a thick head and a sense of repentance?  I guess I look a pretty mucky spectacle when I’m drunk.  I see myself afterwards, and can imagine the rest.  Well, a man in the throes of a woman orgy is just as undignified—­even if he doesn’t lurch—­oh and slobber!  I’ve never heard that your Professor drinks.  That doesn’t happen to be his hunger, you see.  But if he drank to the same extent as he has love-affairs he’d be in an asylum now; and if he were a woman he’d be on the streets!  No woman—­even if she were a Grand Duchess—­would be tolerated with the same number of sex affairs as a man can have.  She’d just have to be a prostitute out and out—­without choice—­or else keep herself in hand.”

“Like Aunt Janet,” murmured Marcella to herself, “and come to acid drops.”

Aloud she said.  “Louis—­I wish you wouldn’t tell me.  I always think of clever men like Kraill as gods and heroes—­I hate to think they have holes in them.  They have such wonderful thoughts.”

“That’s the devil of it.  I know they have.  He has—­Kraill.  I’ve been to his lectures and felt inspired to do anything.  They most of them think much better than they can do, that’s about the size of it!  I suppose we all do that more or less, but we don’t put it on paper to be used in evidence against us.  We think fine things and do smudged ones, and so the world goes on.”