f in a melancholy sort of fashion.
Marcella was _tabula rasa_. It was interesting to watch the impressions
registered on her surface.

The shops gave her none of the acquisitive pleasure he had expected. To
her they were interesting as museums might have been. She could not, she
did not see the use of them. The women thronging the windows and
departments of a great store through which they walked roused her to
excited comment.

"What are they buying them all for?" she said, looking at the hats and
frocks and the purchasers. "They have such nice ones already."

The doctor asked her if she did not think they were very pretty when he
had got over his amusement at the idea of women only buying things
because they needed them.

"Oh beautiful!" she cried rapturously. "But you couldn't do very much in
frocks like that."

"That's the idea, of course," said the doctor, watching her quizzically.
"If you only knew it, Marcella, all these shops are built upon a
foundation of what your professor calls 'questing cells.' You see--but
let's get out into the air. You've started my bee buzzing now."

They faced about and elbowed their way through an eager-eyed,
aimless-footed throng by the doorway.

"Now go on," said Marcella when they were in the street, walking down
beside Liberty's. She had one eye on the windows and one ear for the
doctor.

"You see, all these women here--they're doing something quite
unconsciously when they buy pretty clothes and spend so much time and
money on making themselves look so bonny," said the doctor, striding
along in his Inverness cape, quite oblivious that he was a very unique
figure in Regent Street. "They'll worry tremendously about what colour
suits them, what style sets off their beauty best. I don't think that
it's really because they like to see something bonny every time they
look in their mirror. I don't think it's even that they want admiration,
or envy. It's simply that they're ruled by the law of reproduction, if
they only knew it. Inside them is new life--these same questing cells.
These cells can only find separate existence through complementary
cells. So they urge these women on to make themselves charming,
capturing--married or single, they are the same, deep down, for natural
laws take no count of marriage laws, you know. The men are the same,
too. They beg and placate--and all the time deep down, they think they
are the choosers, the overlords. And the women tempt them and th