"Louis, do you say—wrong things in French" she whispered. "Things—you know, beastly things?"
He hesitated a moment and an impulse of honesty made him tell her the truth.
"Yes, I believe I say perfectly appalling things. You see—it's like this. I'm a queer inhibited sort of thing, dear. I'm always—till you took me in hand—fighting drink. I'm in a state of fighting and inhibiting. I've always been like that. Even when I was a little kid I was afraid to be natural because I was taught that the natural impulse was the wrong one. I sometimes want to say something frightfully charming to you, and don't for fear it's silly. I'm always wondering what people will think of me—because I'm so often wrong, you know."
"I just don't care what anyone says or thinks," she broke in.
"There's the difference between us, then. Well, you see, being an ordinary, average sort of human being, I think a lot about girls and all that. Only deep down is the puritanical old idea that it's wicked to do so. Really, honestly, Marcella, I'm not pulling your leg—when I first started dissecting at the hospital, I felt horribly indecent. It was a female thigh! I felt as if it ought to be clothed, somehow—I sort of kept thinking the Pater or someone would come into the lab, and round on me for being immoral. If it had been a male thigh I wouldn't have cared a brass tanner!"
"It must be awful to have barriers in your mind," she pondered.
"It was just the same with booze. If I had a beer or a whisky in the club as all the others did, I saw the Pater disembodied before me, and had another to give me the courage necessary to face him. Everything, you see, everything—girls, drink, curiosities, courtesies, kindness—all got lumped together as things to keep in hand. I got in a fever of self-consciousness. I do now. I think everyone is watching and criticizing me. Then, you see, when I'm drunk, the watch I set on myself is turned out to grass and I get a damned good rest. I let myself rip! In my sober moments I daren't go and order tea for the Mater in a bunshop because I'm petrified with terror of the waitress. When I'm drunk I'd barge into a harem. That first affair—with the French girl—was a tremendous thing to me. Most boys have played about with that sort of thing before that age. They looked down on me because I hadn't. But it made such a deep dint on my brain that whisky and sex and French are all mixed up together and the one releases the other."
She sighed.
"I do wish Dr. Angus was here, Louis," she said. "I wish I understood better."
"You understand better than Violet did. She used to stay at our place a good deal, you know, and go with us to the seaside and to Scotland. Even when I was right off whisky she used to drive me to it. Evening dress, you know. Oh, frightfully evening! And—in a queer old place we stayed in in Scotland once there were heaps of mice. She used to run out of her room in the middle of the night saying she was frightened of them. And then I had to carry her back, and rub her feet because they'd got cold. She was rather a maddening sort of person, you know. She'd lead one on to biting one's nails and tearing one's hair and then she'd laugh and kiss her hand and run away with my sister into her bedroom. And they'd both laugh. She understood the value of being a woman, did Violet. And she didn't let herself go cheap—I used to get the key of the tantalus and cart a whole decanter of whisky to bed to get over it. If she'd just have let me kiss her—"