Louis was too self-centred, too introspective to make love to anyone; it was only alcohol that released unconscious longings in him:  he had never, consciously, loved anything on earth:  his desperate pleadings with Marcella on the ship had been pleadings for a mother, a caretaker rather than for a lover.  His gross suggestions when he was drunk—­the relics of his boyish first sex adventure—­she did not understand.  Nor did she understand why, when he had lain drunk and asleep that first night in the room below, she had looked at him feeling choked to tears; why she sat up at night watching him as he slept, vaguely discomforted and distressed; why she looked at him with blinded eyes.  Had Louis not roused first her mother love to guard his helplessness, he would never have got into close enough touch with her to rouse the physical passion which might have thus slept on for long years.  All her frowning, bewildered self-analysis could not explain the whirlpool of sensations into which she had fallen, which alternately buffeted her with vague unhappiness and drew her along to ecstasies.  She did not realize that all her dreams of a splendid Lover had become mixed up with the family legend about “taking the man she needed” and had crystallized round Louis, the first man to waken physical passion for her.

In a warm rapture up here on the house-top in the still night air her conscious mind went to sleep; she lived her dreams.  And Louis did not understand; out of the reach of temptation for three weeks, he felt very strong; her tenderness, her passionate love flattered him:  he became a very fine fellow indeed in his own eyes as he lay there, half asleep, under the silver and purple of the midnight sky.  He must be a very fine fellow—­so he argued—­if she could love him.  She had won his reluctant admiration long before she had wakened his love.

“She’s a queer stick,” he told himself drowsily, “and a perfect darling.  Lord, the way she shook the life out of me that night at Naples!  Just because I mentioned her bally old father.  I believe—­I really believe, in spite of her being in the steerage—­that she’s pretty well born!  And the way she stuck Ole Fred in the water without turning a hair.  And got fifty quid out of her uncle as easy as falling off a log!  Lord, I’ve never raised more than a fiver out of an uncle in my life—­and that on a birthday.”

He felt for her hand and held it drowsily.  It was a very cool, hard hand—­not in the least like Violet’s pretty little product of creams and manicure.

“She’s some girl,” he thought.  “And what a blazing wonder that she’ll look at me.  Yet I can twist her round my little finger—­on occasions like to-night.”