ve died," he said.
"I shouldn't repeat the dose."

"There's no need," said van Heerden.

"What time is it?" asked the girl, and sat up. She felt very weak and
weary, but she experienced no giddiness.

"It is twelve o'clock; you have been sleeping since seven last night.
Let me see if you can stand. Get up."

She obeyed meekly. She had no desire to do anything but what she was
told. Her mental condition was one of complete dependence, and had she
been left to herself she would have been content to lie down again.

Yet she felt for a moment a most intense desire to propound some sort of
plan which would give this man the money without going through a
marriage ceremony. That desire lasted a minute and was succeeded by an
added weariness as though this effort at independent thought had added a
new burden to her strength. She knew and was mildly amazed at the
knowledge that she was under the influence of a drug which was
destroying her will, yet she felt no particular urge to make a fight for
freedom of determination. "Freedom of determination." She repeated the
words, having framed her thoughts with punctilious exactness, and
remembered that that was a great war phrase which one was constantly
discovering in the newspapers. All her thoughts were like this--they had
the form of marshalled language, so that even her speculations were
punctuated.

"Walk over to the window," said the doctor, and she obeyed, though her
knees gave way with every step she took. "Now come back--good, you're
all right."

She looked at him, and did not flinch when he laid his two hands on her
shoulders.

"You are going to be married this afternoon--that's all right, isn't
it?"

"Yes," she said, "that is all right."

"And you'll say 'yes' when I tell you to say 'yes,' won't you?"

"Yes, I'll say that," she said.

All the time she knew that this was monstrously absurd. All the time she
knew that she did not wish to marry this man. Fine sentences, pompously
framed, slowly formed in her mind such as: "This outrage will not go
unpunished, comma, and you will suffer for this, comma, Dr. van Heerden,
full stop."

But the effort of creating the protest exhausted her so that she could
not utter it. And she knew that the words were stilted and artificial,
and the working-cells of her brain whispered that she was recalling and
adapting something she had heard at the theatre. She wanted to do the
easiest thing, and it seemed absurdly easy to sa