and feeding while his body was the unreasoning, struggling home of appetites.  She had the torturing hopefulness that comes from alternating failure and success in a dear project; she was getting just a little cynical about him; her clear brain saw that she was his mother, his nurse and, perhaps, his mistress.  He loved her.  She knew that quite well.  But he loved her as so many Christians love Christ—­“because He died for us.”  His love was unadulterated selfishness even though it was the terribly pathetic selfishness of a weak thing seeking prop and salvation.  She faced quite starkly the fact that her love was a love of giving always, receiving never; also she faced the fact that she must kill every weakness in herself, for, by letting him see her hardness, she gave him something to imitate.  Hunger of soul, the black depression that comes to a Kelt like a breath from the grave, weariness of body must all be borne gallantly lest he be “raked up.”  Once or twice, when Louis had slipped and failed and was fighting himself back again, she felt that she was getting bankrupt.  One could never treat Louis by rule of thumb.  He might get drunk if she inadvertently spoke coolly to him.  Then he would get drunk out of pique.  He might get drunk if she had been especially loving. Then it would be because he was happy and wanted to celebrate; if she were ill he would get drunk to drown his anxiety:  if she got better, he would drink to show his relief; if she died, he would drown his grief.  Sometimes she felt that it was quite impossible to safeguard him:  she literally had not the knowledge.  Such knowledge was locked away in a few wise brains like Kraill’s—­and meanwhile people were rotting.  Once she wrote a long letter to Carnegie asking him to stop giving money for libraries and spend some on helping to cure neurotics.  But she destroyed the letter, and went on hoping.  Sometimes she felt that her body would either get out of hand as Louis’s did, or else crack under the strain put upon it by her temperament, Louis and her work.  Sometimes she thought her capacity for happiness would atrophy and drop off if she so defiantly kept it pushed into a dark corner of her being every time it protested to her that it was being starved.  Sometimes she hoped that the time would come quickly when she would have killed desire for everything as Aunt Janet had done, and would be going about the world a thing stuffed with cotton-wool, armoured in cotton-wool.  And all the time she was fighting the insidious temptation to kill the unconscious aristocracy of her that had, after the first few weeks in Sydney, set a barrier between her and Louis—­a barrier of which he was never once conscious.  Other people, on a lower range of life, seemed quite happy with a few thunder flashes of passion in a grey sky.  Louis did.  Except when the end of the month brought pay day, and set him itching to be off to the township, he seemed happy.  At these times she deliberately