There was a long silence.  Then, with a suddenness that disconcerted the doctor, she asked him what Wullie had meant by saying that the Lashcairn women took the man they needed, and went on strange roads.

He filled and lit his pipe before he answered her.

“If I told you you wouldn’t understand.  You’ll come to it in time.  When you do, remember what I said to you.  If you don’t keep your body in hand it’s going to run away with you, like it ran away with your father into yon barrel.  See?”

“No,” she said doubtfully.  “Do you mean be like Aunt Janet?”

“God forbid!  No, not like Aunt Janet.  You’ll see when you come to it, Marcella.  But remember that the nearest most of us ever get to the perfect Trinity is a thing of shreds and patches.  People don’t manage to be perfect.”

“Christ?” ventured Marcella.

“No.  He was brain and spirit without a body.”

“Why, doctor, how about when He fasted in the wilderness—­and the pain on the cross?”

“Bodily pain is much easier to bear than bodily desire, Marcella.  Your poor father would have found it easier to be crucified than to bear his longing for whisky.  And Aunt Janet—­ask her.”

“She wouldn’t tell me.”

“No, I suppose she wouldn’t.  When she was young she saw a man she wanted.  And he was a man she couldn’t have.  Until she got dead as she is now I expect she’d have thought crucifixion a thing easier to bear.  No, there’s no one perfect.  All we are, any of us, is either a soul or a body or a brain developed at the expense of all the rest.  We get great holes torn in us, just as if wolves had been clawing at us.  And it’s the body that makes the most dreadful tears.  Most people don’t see this.  You see, the body’s hungers are the most appeasable—­and being the most appeasable one can’t see why they shouldn’t be yielded to.”

He stopped talking as they drove into the main street of Pitleathy, and while he was with his patient at a little house in the middle of the street Marcella sat thinking.  Loose ends of his talk floated about in her grasping mind and she collected them to make him fasten them down when he came back.

“Do you know, doctor, you’ve muddled me,” she said as they turned homewards in the teeth of the wind.

“I’m sorry for that, Marcella.  You’d better forget what I’ve said.  Sitting alone so much I talk to myself, and I forgot I was talking to a bit lassie like you.  Forget things you don’t understand.”

“And then get more puzzled later on, when they crop up?” she said.  “No.  I want you to tell me, now.  I want to know, now, why mother was ill—­and why Jean and I have headaches.”

“Your mother was ill through an accident,” he said gravely.  “I don’t wish to talk about that.  And as for Jean and you—­well, it’s what we expect of women.  Man has made his women-folk invalids.”

“Doctor!” she gasped.