“It seems wrong to me,” said Marcella slowly.  “I can’t see why a beautiful mind and body shouldn’t be part of each other.”

“You’ve never been introduced to your body yet, Marcella, nor shaken hands with it.  It’s never popped up and made faces at you.  When it does you’ll find folks like Wullie have a good deal to be thankful for.  Your father, for instance—­”

He stopped short, coughed loudly and pulled up the horse to a sharp trot.

“Yes.  The barrel,” she said gravely.

“Who’s been telling you that?”

“Wullie.  I asked him.”

“I wouldn’t have told you, yet.  But it’s right you should know.  You saw how it was with your father.  Whisky ruled him.  It rules all your menfolk like that.  It wasn’t till his body grew weak with sickness—­and sickness, mind you, caused by the whisky—­that he got it in hand.  Then, you see, it was too late.  He conquered a wounded foe.  And, of course, he died.  If he’d got religion earlier, perhaps—­and, after all, that’s only another obsession.”

“Poor father,” she whispered.

“If your father, without religion or anything, could have conquered, Marcella, he’d have been a very heroic figure.  He’d have left footprints in the sand of time, as the poet said.”

Marcella nodded.  This was the first time the idea of conscious heroism came to her.  She said rather breathlessly: 

“But are bodies wicked, doctor?  Lots of people seem to think so.  Aunt Janet thinks people’s bodies are wrong.  All saints seem to think that too.”

“They’re very splendid and bonny if you can keep them in hand.  Christ taught that bodies—­Humanity, that is—­are the veils of God.  It’s only when bodies get out of hand that they go wrong and put a man in hell.  I expect the idea of Trinity-worship that we get in most religions was an unconscious aiming at this truth, that to be a perfect human being you must be the Trinity—­body, brain and spirit.  But we’re not up to that Trinity yet, lassie, by a long chalk.”

“When I used to read those scientific books, and those queer philosophies to father, it seemed to me that bodies were all that mattered.  That was when I was reading biology books and lectures.  It seemed so useless to me—­just living, and handing on life, and living no more.”

“That was the idea when I was at the hospital.  At a hospital, of course, bodies do count tremendously.  But in my day more than now because we were in the reactionary stage from blood-letting, incantations and so on.  I remember how Biology came to me with a sense of crystal precision and inevitability in those days.”

He paused.  Marcella asked rather doubtfully: 

“But do you think that Biology is wrong?”