"But you know, Louis," she said, looking up from her pamphlet with a perplexed frown, "He seems to think that if a man wants a cup of tea and a piece of bread and butter, it's sex!"
"Well, so it is," said Louis calmly, puffing at his cigarette and watching her through the smoke. "Every hunger on earth is sex, right at bottom--every desire is generated by the sex force; drinking, love of parents and children, love of God, the artist's desire for beauty and to create beauty--just sex, old lady!"
"And you're such a bally little Puritan you think that's terrible, don't you?"
"You aren't a Puritan, really, Marcella," he said, watching her face. "It's your upbringing has made you a Puritan."
"Louis," she burst out, "I'd rather be a Puritan, I think--and be all dead and dried up like Aunt Janet, than--than--what you call bowled over. I'd loathe that anything should have me; put me in chains; make me do things! Louis--" her voice dropped to a meek whisper, "it isn't that--that--beastly sort of thing makes me love you, is it? Makes me love to buy flowers and books for you, and make food for you, and be near you? Louis--just because you're a man and I'm a girl?"
"Of course it is, you little silly," he said complacently.
"Then I won't!" she cried hotly. "I won't do a thing because something inside me, over which I have no control, says I've got to! I hate it! It's a chain--I'm--a thing with a will, not just a bundle of instincts."
He looked at her queerly, laughed a little and said nothing. She got the terrible idea that he knew more than she did, that something was weaving a net which all the while she thought was beautiful devotion when it was really something that was getting entangled in her arms and legs so that she could not move as she wished.
"I resent it!" she cried, suddenly, starting up as though she would push the wall through and escape into the street. "I can't bear chains, Louis."
"Then commit suicide," he said, stretching his hand out to her. "Even then some of these mad psychics say that that doesn't kill the thing you're escaping from. They say you die with an appetite and are so earthbound that you come to life again with it still about you. Lord, if I died now I'd come back and be the bung of a whisky barrel--and you--"