s locked up to save him from getting
drunk; at the same time she admired him for attempting so drastic a
cure. It was a wholly delightful experience to her to have money and
spend it on buying things for him; she would, at this time, have been
unrecognizable to Dr. Angus and Wullie; they would never have seen their
rather dreamy, very boy-like, almost unembodied Marcella of Lashnagar in
the Marcella of Sydney, with her alternate brooding maternal tenderness
that guarded him as a baby, or with the melting softness of suddenly
released passion. All her life she had been "saved up," dammed back,
save for her inarticulate adoration of her mother, her heart-rending
love of her father and her comradeship with Wullie and the doctor. Louis
had opened the lock gates of her love and got the full sweep of the
flood. But he gave nothing in return save the appeal of weakness, the
rather disillusioning charm of discovery and novelty.

For the first few weeks in Sydney she walked in an aura of passion
strangely blended of the physical and the spiritual. She knew nothing
about men; what she had seen on the ship made her class them as
nuisances to be put in the sea out of hand. Her father was the only man
she had known intimately before. Her father had been a weak man, and yet
a tyrant and an autocrat. Logically, then, all men were tyrants and
autocrats. The women in Sydney whom she saw in Mrs. King's kitchen,
where she went to learn how to cook, talked much of their husbands,
calling them "boss." Hence she meekly accepted Louis's autocratic
orderings of her coming and going. Again, her father had been gripped,
in the tentacles first of the whisky-cult, and later of the God-cult.
Therefore, she reasoned, all men were so gripped by something. It was a
pity that they were so gripped. It seemed to her that women must have
been created to be soft cushions for men to fall upon, props to keep
them up, nurses to minister to their weakness. She slowly came to
realize that the age of heroes was dead--if it had ever been, outside
the covers of story-books. It seemed that Siegfried no longer lived to
slay dragons, that Andromeda would have to buckle on armour, slip her
bonds and save her Perseus when he got into no end of entanglements on
his way to rescue her. By degrees she came to think that men were
children, to be humoured by being called "boss" or "hero" as the case
may be. Reading the extraordinary assortment of books sent to her by the
doc