except of senile decay or accident—­and those we’ll eliminate in time!  I feel that there’s only a dyke of matchboarding between me and the ocean of knowledge.  One day it’s going to break, and I’ll be flooded with it.  It’s a most uncanny feeling, old girl.  One of the chaps here—­a rather mad American—­says that there are people who’ve broken that dyke down—­Shakespeare, for instance. (But if I broke it down, I wouldn’t be such a footler as to write plays and poems, would you?) Corlyon—­that’s the mad American—­is the son of a big psychologist at Harvard; he gave me some light on Kraill’s remark about dreams that day.  He says they’re being used a lot by some German and American alienists in curing all sorts of neuroses. (By the way, old girl, next time you write, tell me if you understand all these technicalities.  I want you to understand them, and if you don’t I’ll explain as I go on.  One never can be sure about you.  Sometimes you seem no end of a duffer, and next minute you come out with an amazing piece of penetration.) Well, these new psychologists say that things like drinking, sex, drugging, kleptomania, and all these bally nuisances that make people impossible members of a community, come from repression.  A man has a perfectly well-meaning impulse to do something.  His education, or his religion or his convention tells him it’s wrong, so he represses it.  He fights it, pushes it back.  It gets encysted and, in time, forms a spiritual abscess.  It’s got to break through.  Of course, the idea is not to repress things at all.  I don’t say let things rip, and go in for a whole glorious orgy of wine, woman and song.  But take the desire out, have a talk with it, and make it look silly like Kraill made whisky look silly to me.  There, I thought that would interest you. (A bit more proof how damnably clever he was!)

“Marcella, I told you then I’d be the same to you as Kraill was, didn’t I?  I worshipped you; I wanted you; you were my saviour, and I’d have picked up the Great Pyramid and walked off staggering with it if you’d asked me.  That was the path that carried me over my particular messy morass (that, and my acquisitive spirit that objected to giving up part of my goods and chattels!) And now—­listen here, old lady!  It’s a thing a chap couldn’t say to most of his wives.  I can say it to you and know that you’ll understand. (That’s the heavenly safeness of you.  You do understand, and never judge resentfully) Marcella, I’m going to be the sort of man Kraill is!  And I’m going to be it not for you at all now!  I’m going to be bigger than he, even.  And I know he’ll be big enough to be glad if I am.  A good doctor’s reward is in his patient’s recovery, and in a way, whatever the patient does afterwards counts to the doctor, doesn’t it?  So now, old girl, if there was no you on earth, I’d still keep my tail up!  Put that in your pipe of peace and smoke it!  Different days, isn’t it to the time when I couldn’t be sent to buy a