. And last, but trust me, not
least, I will help you to believe that your wife loves you and is happy
in her home. We need such help, Marchbanks: we need it greatly and
always. There are so many things to make us doubt, if once we let our
understanding be troubled. Even at home, we sit as if in camp,
encompassed by a hostile army of doubts. Will you play the traitor and
let them in on me?

MARCHBANKS (looking round him). Is it like this for her here always? A
woman, with a great soul, craving for reality, truth, freedom, and
being fed on metaphors, sermons, stale perorations, mere rhetoric. Do
you think a woman's soul can live on your talent for preaching?

MORELL (Stung). Marchbanks: you make it hard for me to control myself.
My talent is like yours insofar as it has any real worth at all. It is
the gift of finding words for divine truth.

MARCHBANKS (impetuously). It's the gift of the gab, nothing more and
nothing less. What has your knack of fine talking to do with the truth,
any more than playing the organ has? I've never been in your church;
but I've been to your political meetings; and I've seen you do what's
called rousing the meeting to enthusiasm: that is, you excited them
until they behaved exactly as if they were drunk. And their wives
looked on and saw clearly enough what fools they were. Oh, it's an old
story: you'll find it in the Bible. I imagine King David, in his fits
of enthusiasm, was very like you. (Stabbing him with the words.) "But
his wife despised him in her heart."

MORELL (wrathfully). Leave my house. Do you hear? (He advances on him
threateningly.)

MARCHBANKS (shrinking back against the couch). Let me alone. Don't
touch me. (Morell grasps him powerfully by the lapel of his coat: he
cowers down on the sofa and screams passionately.) Stop, Morell, if you
strike me, I'll kill myself. I won't bear it. (Almost in hysterics.)
Let me go. Take your hand away.

MORELL (with slow, emphatic scorn.) You little snivelling, cowardly
whelp. (Releasing him.) Go, before you frighten yourself into a fit.

MARCHBANKS (on the sofa, gasping, but relieved by the withdrawal of
Morell's hand). I'm not afraid of you: it's you who are afraid of me.

MORELL (quietly, as he stands over him). It looks like it, doesn't it?

MARCHBANKS (with petulant vehemence). Yes, it does. (Morell turns away
contemptuously. Eugene scrambles to his feet and follows him.) You
think because I shrink from being brutally handled--b