t as they've been known to be run over by a taxi," he said.

"Yes. Well then, let's try to be quite unemotional about this stranger
called Marcella that we're both keen about. If she did happen to finish
up--out of sheer cussedness and desire to make a sensation, next week,
you'd be the victim of a ghost, Louis! I'd simply have to be back to see
what you're up to! You know what a managing sort of person Marcella is,
don't you?"

He made a desperate effort to be unemotional, and presently he said,
very decidedly:

"I know now what I'm going to do, old girl! I absolutely refuse to allow
illness to go on! There! That's a challenge to the Almighty, if He likes
to take it--"

She laughed gently, with tears in her eyes.

"I feel helpless. And I'm fed up with feeling helpless. That
socialization of knowledge has got to begin, or I'll--Oh. I don't know!
Look at the idiocy of it! Here we are in the twentieth century, and
people are dying like flies all over the show. Why, there's no room for
houses because there's so much room needed for grave-yards! And--even
if they don't die, they're ill, most of them. And I'm not going to have
it!"

"Louis! What are you going to do?" she said, staring at him, taken out
of her fear by his enthusiasm. "I've never seen you like this before."

"No. I never have been. But this business of illness has just come and
touched me on the raw, you see! You ought not to be ill. It's waste and
lunacy to think of it. And I--ten years of my life wasted by a neurosis!
And your father, and Lord knows how many millions more! I'll tell you
this much, Marcella! Before five years have gone by I'll be in the
battlefield against illness, and I'll be damned if illness won't have to
look out! I loathe it, just as you do! I resent it! I'm going to stop
it. Listen, old girl, as soon as you're out of that hospital, you're off
to England, and I'm going to the Pater, and I'm going on my knees to beg
him to give me another go at the hospital. I've got to get my tools
ready, you know--"

"Do you think your father will?"

"He'll be sceptical. I should if I were he. I've been such a bounder to
him in the past. But if he's too sceptical to help--well, I'll go to
Buckingham Palace and ask King George to lend me the money! I should
think he'd be jolly glad to think there was a chance of wiping out
illness for ever."

Tears brimmed over: it was when she saw the eternal child in Louis that
she loved him most, and was