tor, as time went on, it seemed to her that John the Baptist of
to-day had gone aside from making straight the pathway of the Lord to
lie in the tangles of Salome's hair. In all the great names she read
there seemed to be a kink; some of them were under a cloud of drugs or
drink; de Quincey hurt her terribly; sitting one day on the side of
Louis's bed reading "John Barleycorn"--she had discovered Jack London in
the "Cruise of the Snark" and loved his fine adventurousness--she felt
that she could not bear to know a thing so fine, so joyous and so
dashing as he should have so miserable a neurosis.

Dr. Angus, among other things, sent her Kraill's Lendicott Trust Autumn
lectures in the form of six little grey covered pamphlets. They were
much coloured by recent inspiring German and American sex psychology.
But she did not know that. She thought that they began, continued and
ended in Kraill and, though she fell down in adoration before his
uncanny wisdom, his cynicism made her miserable. They showed her
humanity in chains; particularly did they show her man in chains; she
read them all--six of them--in one afternoon and evening; students and
trained scientists had taken them in doses of one a fortnight. Naturally
she got mental indigestion that was not helped by the fact that, six to
a dozen times on every page, she had to find the meaning of words in a
dictionary she had bought to look up the meaning of Louis's remark the
first night they were married. He was amused and tolerant about the
dictionary. He seemed to think girls need not trouble to understand what
they read. He was particularly superior about "little girls trying to
take strong meat when they were at the milk-for-babes stage of
development."

"But you know, Louis," she said, looking up from her pamphlet with a
perplexed frown, "He seems to think that if a man wants a cup of tea and
a piece of bread and butter, it's sex!"

"Well, so it is," said Louis calmly, puffing at his cigarette and
watching her through the smoke. "Every hunger on earth is sex, right at
bottom--every desire is generated by the sex force; drinking, love of
parents and children, love of God, the artist's desire for beauty and to
create beauty--just sex, old lady!"

He laughed at her horrified face.

"And you're such a bally little Puritan you think that's terrible, don't
you?"

She nodded, flushing.

"You aren't a Puritan, really, Marcella," he said, watching her face.
"It's your u