nderstand all these technicalities. I want you to understand
them, and if you don't I'll explain as I go on. One never can be sure
about you. Sometimes you seem no end of a duffer, and next minute you
come out with an amazing piece of penetration.) Well, these new
psychologists say that things like drinking, sex, drugging, kleptomania,
and all these bally nuisances that make people impossible members of a
community, come from repression. A man has a perfectly well-meaning
impulse to do something. His education, or his religion or his
convention tells him it's wrong, so he represses it. He fights it,
pushes it back. It gets encysted and, in time, forms a spiritual
abscess. It's got to break through. Of course, the idea is not to
repress things at all. I don't say let things rip, and go in for a whole
glorious orgy of wine, woman and song. But take the desire out, have a
talk with it, and make it look silly like Kraill made whisky look silly
to me. There, I thought that would interest you. (A bit more proof how
damnably clever he was!)

"Marcella, I told you then I'd be the same to you as Kraill was, didn't
I? I worshipped you; I wanted you; you were my saviour, and I'd have
picked up the Great Pyramid and walked off staggering with it if you'd
asked me. That was the path that carried me over my particular messy
morass (that, and my acquisitive spirit that objected to giving up part
of my goods and chattels!) And now--listen here, old lady! It's a thing
a chap couldn't say to most of his wives. I can say it to you and know
that you'll understand. (That's the heavenly safeness of you. You do
understand, and never judge resentfully) Marcella, I'm going to be the
sort of man Kraill is! And I'm going to be it not for you at all now!
I'm going to be bigger than he, even. And I know he'll be big enough to
be glad if I am. A good doctor's reward is in his patient's recovery,
and in a way, whatever the patient does afterwards counts to the doctor,
doesn't it? So now, old girl, if there was no you on earth, I'd still
keep my tail up! Put that in your pipe of peace and smoke it! Different
days, isn't it to the time when I couldn't be sent to buy a baby's
feeding-bottle without getting boozed? I knew you'd like to know that.
Oh, wasn't I a fool to think you wanted to tie me to your apron strings?
I've got to neglect you for a bit now. I've got to run on without you,
dear. Thank God you're not the sort to get huffy about it, and want