ntred, too introspective to make love to anyone; it
was only alcohol that released unconscious longings in him: he had
never, consciously, loved anything on earth: his desperate pleadings
with Marcella on the ship had been pleadings for a mother, a caretaker
rather than for a lover. His gross suggestions when he was drunk--the
relics of his boyish first sex adventure--she did not understand. Nor
did she understand why, when he had lain drunk and asleep that first
night in the room below, she had looked at him feeling choked to tears;
why she sat up at night watching him as he slept, vaguely discomforted
and distressed; why she looked at him with blinded eyes. Had Louis not
roused first her mother love to guard his helplessness, he would never
have got into close enough touch with her to rouse the physical passion
which might have thus slept on for long years. All her frowning,
bewildered self-analysis could not explain the whirlpool of sensations
into which she had fallen, which alternately buffeted her with vague
unhappiness and drew her along to ecstasies. She did not realize that
all her dreams of a splendid Lover had become mixed up with the family
legend about "taking the man she needed" and had crystallized round
Louis, the first man to waken physical passion for her.

In a warm rapture up here on the house-top in the still night air her
conscious mind went to sleep; she lived her dreams. And Louis did not
understand; out of the reach of temptation for three weeks, he felt very
strong; her tenderness, her passionate love flattered him: he became a
very fine fellow indeed in his own eyes as he lay there, half asleep,
under the silver and purple of the midnight sky. He must be a very fine
fellow--so he argued--if she could love him. She had won his reluctant
admiration long before she had wakened his love.

"She's a queer stick," he told himself drowsily, "and a perfect darling.
Lord, the way she shook the life out of me that night at Naples! Just
because I mentioned her bally old father. I believe--I really believe,
in spite of her being in the steerage--that she's pretty well born! And
the way she stuck Ole Fred in the water without turning a hair. And got
fifty quid out of her uncle as easy as falling off a log! Lord, I've
never raised more than a fiver out of an uncle in my life--and that on a
birthday."

He felt for her hand and held it drowsily. It was a very cool, hard
hand--not in the least like Violet's p