"You know what I mean," he said desperately. "Me, his father, a drunkard, with drink in his family, and you the descendant of dozens of drunkards. And what's more, though you are not a drunkard, you're as mad as a hatter. What the devil is the poor little beggar going to do?"
She was suddenly awake and very serious.
"Listen, Louis," she said, holding his hands very tight. "I got that jerk-back most dreadfully in Sydney. Mrs. King was saying that the crowning mercy of her life was the fact that she hadn't any children. But it's a mad, bad, heretical sort of fear, the sort of heresy against nature that people ought to be burnt at the stake for believing! This child is no more your child and mine than Jesus was the child of Joseph the carpenter, or—or Romulus and Remus were the children of the wolf-mother. We've given him his flesh. We're his foster-parents, if you like. But God and Humanity are his father and mother. I found all this out one night on the roof in Sydney. He's a little bit of the spirit of God incarnate for awhile."
"Keltic imagination," he said tentatively.
"Very well, then. If you don't like it my way, I'll put it in the scientific way. You twitted me once for forgetting that biology applied to us two. Doesn't it apply here? Biology shows that nature's pushing out, paring down weaknesses and things that get in the way. If a drunkard—who is a weakness, a scar on the face of nature—was going to have drunkard babies, nature would make something happen to drunkards so that they can't have children at all...."
"She does—in the last stages," murmured Louis.
"That's a good thing, perhaps. But I don't believe in inheriting things like drinking. I don't believe my people inherited it at all. They inherited a sort of temperament, perhaps—and it was the sort of temperament that was accessible to drink-hunger. People talk about drinking, or other weaknesses being in their families. Drinking seems to be in most families nowadays, simply because people are slack and lazy and drinking is the easiest and least expensive weakness to pander to. But I certainly believe most hereditary weakness comes from legend or from imitation. It's idiotic nonsense. When you're a kiddie you hear all sorts of family talk about family characteristics; it becomes a sort of legend and you live up to it unconsciously. You see your parents doing things, and because you're with your parents a great deal just at the time when you're soft, like a jelly just poured into a mould, you get like your parents. And then it's too late—too late to alter, I mean, unless you take a fork and beat the jelly up again, or warm it on the fire and make it melt. I've read a lot about this, and I believe it's at the bottom of half the morbid stuff people write and talk about hereditary drunkards and criminals...."
"But statistics," began Louis.
"The worst of statistics is that people only quote the statistics that will prove their argument. They don't quote those for the other side. If drunkards' children become drunkards it's probably because their lives are so desperately miserable that they take the most obvious way of drowning the misery. Anyway, Louis—"
"Lord, you are getting dictatorial, Marcella," he said.