Dr. Angus, among other things, sent her Kraill’s Lendicott Trust Autumn lectures in the form of six little grey covered pamphlets. They were much coloured by recent inspiring German and American sex psychology. But she did not know that. She thought that they began, continued and ended in Kraill and, though she fell down in adoration before his uncanny wisdom, his cynicism made her miserable. They showed her humanity in chains; particularly did they show her man in chains; she read them all—six of them—in one afternoon and evening; students and trained scientists had taken them in doses of one a fortnight. Naturally she got mental indigestion that was not helped by the fact that, six to a dozen times on every page, she had to find the meaning of words in a dictionary she had bought to look up the meaning of Louis’s remark the first night they were married. He was amused and tolerant about the dictionary. He seemed to think girls need not trouble to understand what they read. He was particularly superior about “little girls trying to take strong meat when they were at the milk-for-babes stage of development.”
“But you know, Louis,” she said, looking up from her pamphlet with a perplexed frown, “He seems to think that if a man wants a cup of tea and a piece of bread and butter, it’s sex!”
“Well, so it is,” said Louis calmly, puffing at his cigarette and watching her through the smoke. “Every hunger on earth is sex, right at bottom—every desire is generated by the sex force; drinking, love of parents and children, love of God, the artist’s desire for beauty and to create beauty—just sex, old lady!”
He laughed at her horrified face.
“And you’re such a bally little Puritan you think that’s terrible, don’t you?”
She nodded, flushing.
“You aren’t a Puritan, really, Marcella,” he said, watching her face. “It’s your upbringing has made you a Puritan.”