“I don’t know your name,” she read; “but I must see you.  I’ve been going through hell and I can’t hold out.  I understand myself very well; I know what I need, but I can’t do it.  I’ve got to have someone to make me do things.  And if you make me do things I’ll get huffy with you and try to deceive you.  It’s pretty hopeless, isn’t it?  That pock-marked devil has been trying to get me.  That’s why I’ve been taking to cover all this time, partly.  Come up on the fo’c’sle to-night at seven.  I’ll be sitting on the anchor.  For God’s sake come.  And don’t laugh at me, will you?  I can’t stand it.  L. F.”

Without pausing she took paper and pencil and wrote.

“I shall be there.  Of course I shall not laugh at you.  I cannot understand anything.  I am sorry to admit this, because you will say I am like your parents.  I am in muddles myself, but I am most sorry for you.  And my name is Marcella Lashcairn of Lashnagar.”

She put it in an envelope, addressed it to him, tapped on his door and pushed it under.

She went on deck that afternoon in a state of bubbling excitement.  There were not many people about.  They were just getting into the Bay of Biscay and the Oriana was rolling a little; many had succumbed to sea-sickness; many more were afraid of it and had gone to lie down in their bunks.  She took some books to read but did not open them for a long time until the sea-glare had made her eyes ache.

Then she opened “Questing Cells,” which she had decided to try to master during the voyage.  She read a page, understanding much better than when she had read it to her father.  But she was pulled up over the word “inhibition.”

It was a chapter of generalization at the end of the book that she was trying to fathom.

"Women have no inhibitions:  their pretended inhibitions serve exactly the same purpose as the civet-cat’s scent of musk, the peacock’s gorgeous tail, the glow-worm’s lamp.  A woman’s inhibitions are invitations.  Women do not exist—­per se.  They are merely the vehicles of existence.  If they fail to reproduce their kind, they have failed in their purpose; they are unconsciously ruled by the philoprogenitive passion; it is their raison d’etre, for it they are fed, clothed, trained, bred.  Existing for the race, they enjoy existence merely in the preliminary canter.  Small brained, short-visioned, they lose sight of the race and desire the preliminary canter, with its excitements and promises, to continue indefinitely."

The word “philoprogenitive” and the French phrase stopped her.

“Why on earth I didn’t bring a dictionary,” she said, “passes my comprehension!  I’ll write the words down and ask someone.”

A young man was sitting on the deck a few yards away, his back against a capstan.  He looked supremely uncomfortable trying to read a little blue-backed book.

Marcella looked at Louis’s chair empty beside her.