“Marcella,” he said solemnly, “the other night I had d.t.—­just a mild attack.  Ask any doctor and he’ll tell you about it.  Those things I said to you I didn’t say, really.  They were just lunacy.  There was an Indian student at the hospital who used to assure us solemnly that delirious or drugged or drunk people were possessed by the spirits of dead folks; drunkards by drunkards’ spirits who wanted drink so badly they got into living bodies to satisfy their craving that even death couldn’t kill.  I used to laugh at him as a mad psychic.  But I’m hanged if it doesn’t look as if there’s something in it.  You know I couldn’t talk to you like that, little girl, don’t you?  You forget that this is illness, dearie.”

“I’m afraid I do, Louis.  Anyway, whether it’s you or—­or—­an obsessing spirit, or anything else, I can’t help it.  I can’t have you talk like that any more.”

“No—­I quite see that,” he said thoughtfully.  “I can explain it, you know.”

“I’m tired of explaining,” she said wearily, sitting on the table with her legs swinging.  Her hair was plaited back and tied with a big bow, as she usually wore it in the house; his heart contracted with pity as he saw what a girl she looked.

“I don’t think people ever realize how deeply this question of physical fidelity has sunk into us—­as a race, I mean.  If you knew it, Marcella, it’s absolutely the first thing of which people accuse those they love when they get deranged in any way.  A dear old man I knew—­he was quite eighty—­a professor of psychology—­when he was dying had the most terrible grief because he seriously thought he’d got unlimited numbers of girls into trouble.  I suppose”—­he went on slowly, wrestling with his thoughts as he put them into words—­“I suppose it’s because we resent infidelity so bitterly or else—­why is it it touches us on the raw so much?  Why is it you were so sick with me for saying that insane thing about King and Hop Lee?”

“I don’t know, Louis,” she said hopelessly.  “It simply made me feel sick.”

“But—­it did touch you on the raw, you know, or you wouldn’t have felt sick.  It wouldn’t make you feel sick if I accused you of murder or burglary—­I believe it’s simply because we might, all of us, very conceivably break the seventh commandment; in fact, I don’t believe anybody goes through life, however sheltered and inhibited they may be, without wanting to break it at least once!  And that’s why we’re so mad when anyone says we have.”

She thought this out for a while.

“Well, I think that’s perfectly disgusting, and that’s all I can say about it,” she said finally.