to Edinburgh to hear him again.  It makes me sad, sometimes, to think how little chance we doctors in practice, with all our responsibilities and opportunities, have of getting this heaping up of wisdom that comes to men like Kraill.  Measles and rheumatics, confinements and bronchitis take up all our time, and when we get a man like poor Andrew your father, something out of the ordinary, appealing to us for healing, we give him digitalis or Epsom-salts for the elixir of life.  We do our best, but it’s bad—­very bad.  When I talked to Kraill that day I kept thinking of your father.  I kept thinking he’d have been alive to-day if he could have caught on to Kraill’s philosophy.  I feel small, Marcella.  I honestly hadn’t the brains, the knowledge, to do anything for your father.  I talked to Kraill about it.  He said something very kind and very queer about the socialization of knowledge.  I didn’t quite catch on to it at the time, but thinking it out afterwards it seemed to me that he meant knowledge was not to be a Holy of Holies sort of thing, a jealous mystery, an aristocratic thing, any more; but be spread broadcast, so that everyone could have wisdom and healing and clear thinking.  And after all, isn’t healing, more than anything else, merely clear thinking?  I hate the waste of people, you know.  I hate that people should rot and die.  I feel personally affronted when I think about your father, and some days—­I strongly suspect it’s when my liver’s out of order—­I worry about your young son.  But by the time he’s grown up maybe Kraill’s socialization of knowledge will have begun.”

Marcella was having an argument with Mrs. Beeton that day when Jerry brought the letter in.  Mrs. Beeton seemed to think it was necessary to have an oven, a pastry board, a roller and various ingredients before one could attempt jam tarts.  Marcella felt that a mixture of flour, fruit salt, and water baked in the clay oven heaped over with blazing wood ought to beat Mrs. Beeton at her own game.  She and young Andrew, both covered in flour because he loved to smack his hands in it and watch it rise round them in curly white clouds were watching beside the fire for the sticks to burn down.  When she read the doctor’s letter she sat down immediately to write to him.  She knew so well that sense of inadequacy that trying to help Louis always gave her, and she wanted to cure him of it.  The jam tarts got burned; she forgot about them.  It was only when she remembered that the letter could not go to the post for three days that she decided to write it again at greater leisure.

The two years had aged Marcella; the doctor’s letters were manna in the desert to her spirit, his books the only paths out of the hard, tough life of everyday.  Sometimes she felt tempted to take the cheap thrills of purely physical existence with Louis as she realized more and more that, though his schooled and trained brain was a better machine than hers, his soul was a weak plant requiring constant cossetting