"You may think, seeing me such a bundle of nerves as I am now, that I
couldn't have done it," he said. "But when I'm doing the doctor job I'm
a different being; I lose myself. I just gave him another whiff of
A.C.E., called to the nurses to fetch candles and got on with it. He's
walking about London to-day--as right as nine-pence."
She knew nothing about hospitals, had never seen one in her life; he
called most things by their bewildering technical names and she listened
respectfully as a layman will always listen to technicalities. She did
not know that the whole thing was a fabrication; in spite of his warning
about his lying she had naturally thought that, if he should lie to her
at all it would be about drinking and not about everyday affairs. And
he, carried away by his imagination and his desire to impress her,
scarcely realized what he was doing.
Marcella was very bad for him; her courteous belief in him encouraged
him to deceive her; he thought she was rather silly; any other girl
would have chaffed him, have capped his tales by others, obviously
"tall" as Violet had done until he had sickened her entirely; but to
Marcella's Keltic imagination there was nothing incredible in his gory,
gorgeous exploits; was not she, herself, the daughter of a faraway
spaewife who could slide down moonbeams and ride on the breasts of
snowflakes? And was not she herself a fighter of windmills? To her
Romance could not come in too brightly-coloured garb, and so her Romance
wove a net about him.
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