And so she talked to him, and as she talked his quick mind gained an impression of her going about sordid ways and small woman tasks in knightly armour.  After awhile he said something unexpected.  It made her impatient for it showed that he was thinking of her.  She was thinking only of Louis.

“You know, you make the years slip away,” he said.  “I have dreamed that women might go shoulder to shoulder with men, standing up straight and strong.”

“Yes, I know,” she said softly.  “I think many a time I’ve very deliberately stood up straight when I wanted to lie down and cry my eyes out, just because I got the idea of a woman knight from those lectures of yours.  And your talk about the softness of women rather goaded me.  I wouldn’t be soft.”

“Soft!  You’re not soft,” he interrupted.

“But think how expensive it is!” she said with a voice that shook a little.  “It took a lifetime of discipline and two weak men to make me hard.  I know now, very well, that Louis has been softened, weakened by me.  To save him I think I must crumple up.”

She caught her breath sharply.

“And I don’t see how I can,” she added.

“One might pretend,” he said slowly, looking reflectively at her face.

“I couldn’t.  I can’t pretend anything.  That’s the worst of me.  And it seems so wrong to me that, to make one human being strong, another must be weak.  And it seems to me that the weak thing kills the strong in the end.  Like ivy, you know, choking out the life of an oak.”

“I don’t think he is likely to kill you.”

“I very much wish he would, except that I dare not leave him.  I have weighed it all up very carefully, and I feel it would be better to die than live this way.  Sometimes I feel I shall get unclean—­right inside.  I can’t explain it.  There are things in Louis I can’t bear—­little meannesses, and selfishnesses.  He locks things up—­even here, where no one ever comes.  That’s a horrible spirit of selfishness, isn’t it?”

She told him calmly, uncomplainingly, impersonally as one talks to a doctor, of his locking up his cigarettes, his tobacco, his writing paper; of how he carried the only pencil about in his pocket and hid away the papers from his mother, the books from Dr. Angus until he had read them.  One day last week they had been short of milk, and Marcella had been anxious about the boy’s food.  The breakfast was on the table; she had to run to her bedroom for a bib for Andrew.  When she got back Louis had already poured all the milk into his tea, saying that he had done it by accident.  Another time she had thrown away the boy’s tablet of soap by accident, and could not find it anywhere.  Louis had his own tablet, locked away; there was no other nearer than Klondyke except the home-made stuff composed of mutton fat and lye, very cruel to tender skin.  And he had made a scene when she asked him for his soap for Andrew and, when she, too, made a scene threw it away into the scrub where she could not find it.  Little things—­little straws that showed the way of the hurricane.