and under orders, you know.  And he said:  ’Suppose your master had jabbed the hatpin just anywhere, nowhere near the centre—­how the orange would have wobbled, wouldn’t it?’ I said it would, and he went on to say the hatpin wasn’t jabbed through my centre, and that’s why I wobbled so much.  That was very reasonable, too—­but I told him I didn’t see how the hatpin was going to be pulled out.  Yet all the time I listened to him, sort of fascinated by a charm he has—­seems a ridiculous thing to say about a man, doesn’t it?”

“No—­not a bit,” she said faintly.

“He seemed to care a lot about me.  No one but you ever had.  And then he asked me if I realized what a thin time you had of it.  ’Does it ever occur to you, Louis, that your wife has had a superhuman job?  And she’s only a girl after all.  You know what women are,’ he said.  They pretend to us that they’re so very strong and independent.  Like a child trying to lift a great weight, and saying:  ’No, no—­you shan’t help.  I can do it,’ and in the same minute dropping it on his toes with a smash and coming to be comforted!  Marcella’s like that.  She’s brave.  But she’s got to the cracking stage now.  She’s got to be taken care of.  I didn’t believe it.  It seemed incongruous.”

“After what I’d just told you?”

“Yes.  I’ve always, even as a kid, been such a liar that when anyone was brutally honest I thought they were posing.  Kraill said, ’You’ll never be fit to take care of her.  You’re just a parasite.  She’s coming away with me now.’  That squared with what I’d thought of your brutal honesty.  I thought it was a blind, and that you were just coming back to fetch Andrew and then go.  I wasn’t cross with Kraill then.  I simply crumpled up.”

There was a long silence.  When he spoke again he spoke as though sharing a secret with her.

“Do you know, I believe Kraill was playing with us both, Marcella?  I believe he’d gauged you right, and me too.  I believe he made love to you, knowing your cussed pride.  He knew you’d turn to me, and that your turning to me would save me.  I believe he was bluffing when he said he was going to take you.  You never know, with men like that.  Biology and psychology—!  He’s got people’s bodies and brains and souls dissected, and nothing they can do is unaccountable to him!  Men like that are beyond the ordinary human weaknesses, you know.”

She did know, very much better than he, and hugged dear thoughts as she smiled faintly at him.

“Then he began to take whisky out and hold it up in front of me by its hind legs, kicking.  And it looked pretty silly before he’d finished with it.  I was sick of it, I tell you.”

She started.  She remembered how ashamed he had made her of those momentary cheap thrills of hers.  What was it he had said—­“Like a queen going on the streets?”

“He’d smashed me up, I tell you.”

“And me,” she said softly.