“I don’t understand you, Louis,” she said weakly.  “And—­and I haven’t got a dictionary to look up things.”  He was not listening to her.  He went on raving.

“You mustn’t trust me!  Do you hear?  If a doctor got hold of me, he’d lock me up!  And that would do no real good!  Nobody wants to help a drunkard, nobody tells him how to get a hold on himself.  They’re barbarous to us—­like they were to the lepers and the loonies in the Bible.”

“I’m not barbarous, Louis.  Oh, my dear, my dear—­you know I’d do anything.”

“No, but you’re a fool and don’t understand!  Why can’t some wise person do something for me?  Marcella, you’re a fool, I tell you.  You don’t know.  You don’t understand when I’m lying to you.  God, why aren’t you sharp enough—­or dirty enough yourself—­to see that I’m brain and bone, a liar?  You didn’t know that I was drinking champagne at lunch to-day, did you?  Violet would have known!  You didn’t know I’d two flasks of whisky in my pockets, and kept getting rid of you a minute to have a swig, did you?  If only you were a liar yourself, you’d understand that I was!”

She sat back against the foot of the bed, feeling as though all her bones had melted away.

“Then what am I to do?” she said weakly, letting her hands drop.  “I’ve no one to tell me but you.”

“And I lie to you!  God knows what we’re going to do.  I’ve lied again about the money.  I never wrote and told the Pater be damned to his money!  There’ll be two weeks waiting for me at the G.P.O. now.  Why did you believe me?”

“Louis—­listen to me.  I thought you were giving yourself a bad name and hanging yourself.  I thought if you sponged out all thought of drink from your mind you’d be cured.”

There was a gloomy silence.  At last he burst out impatiently.

“Why aren’t women taught elementary psychology before they get married?  That is very good treatment for anyone who has a scrap of moral fibre in him.  But I haven’t.  It won’t work with me.  You mustn’t trust me.  I’m a man with a castrated soul, Marcella.  I’ve killed the active part of me by drinking and lying and slacking.  You’ve got to treat me like a kid or a lunatic.  I am one, really—­there, don’t look frightened, but it’s true—­Listen, old girl.  Keep me locked up.  I mean it, seriously.  If I can be forcibly kept off the blasted stuff I’ll get some sort of perspective.  Now everything looks wobbly to me.  Then, when I’ve got the drink out, you’ve to graft something on to me.  Why in hell’s name didn’t I marry a girl who knew medicine?  Don’t you know that if a great chunk of skin is burnt off anyone, more is grafted on?”

She nodded, her eyes wide with terror.

“Well, I’m telling you this now honestly.  Presently I’ll be lying again.  Marcella, I’ve to have will-power grafted on to me, and until I have, I’m going to stay in bed.  See?”

He was fumbling for his keys in his pockets.  He gave them to her with trembling hands.  There was a flask of whisky untouched in his pocket, and two empty ones.  He threw them through the window regardless of passers-by.