"I—I s-say, Marcella. I—I—d-daren't," he groaned. "He'll ask me to wet it. And I'll not be able to say no. And oh my God, I don't want to do it any more."
"Then I'll take it," she said promptly, and darted along with it to Number Fifteen, listened while Ole Fred said every insulting thing he could about Louis and all Louis's ancestors and then calmly asked him for a receipt for the money.
Louis was still sitting on the floor. He looked up, his bloodshot eyes appealing as he looked at her.
"I say, M-m-marcella. I'm sorry I said all those nasty things about your father."
"There you are again, Louis! Forget them all! Forget everything but the future now. I can't imagine where I've got this conviction from, but it's absolutely right, I know. If you'll wipe out all your memory and start clean, you'll be cured."
"I could never do as your father did—all that religion business."
"I don't think I could, Louis. Father saw God as a militant Captain, someone outside himself. I'd never get thinking that about God. But it seems to me, in your case, you want to find someone you could trust, someone who would take the responsibility from you. Just as God did for father. Even if we say there is no God at all, he thought there was and acted on his thought—I suppose it's when we feel weak as father did that we get the idea of God at all."
"It all seems rot to me," he told her. "I laugh at God—as a relic of fetishism."
There was a long, hopeless silence. At last he said dully:
"There are some doctors—our old Dean at St. Crispin's, that I could throw myself upon as your father threw himself upon God. But they're not here."