At any rate, just about a fortnight after Reggie went to Mürren, the abominable winter climate of London gave Elizabeth some sort of a chill inside and upset her interior economy. Within four or five days she became quite demented. She insisted that she was with child, and insisted that the only solution was for George to marry her—at once. Perhaps the afternoon with Reggie had somehow inserted the idea of marriage into her “subconscious.” At all events, her extraordinary energy was suddenly concentrated upon attaining a state which she had hitherto utterly scorned. It was a silly thing to do, but one really cannot blame her. Men are oddly callous about these mysterious female maladies and demoniacal possessions. They get peevish and pathetic enough if something goes wrong with their own livers, but they are strangely unsympathetic about the profounder derangements of their yoke-fellows in iniquity. Perhaps they might feel a little more humane if they too had a sort of twenty-eight day clock inside them, always a nuisance, often liable to go wrong and set up irregular blood-pressure and an intolerable poisoning of the brain. George ought to have hiked her off to a gynecologist at once. Instead of which, he behaved as stupidly as any George Augustus would have done under the circumstances. He did nothing but gasp and stare at Elizabeth’s whirling tantrums, and worry, and offer exasperating comfort, and propose remedies and measures which, as Elizabeth told him, with a stamp of her foot, were impossible, impossible, _impossible_. Of course, by the Triumphal Scheme for the Perfect Sex Relation, it was duly enacted that under such circumstances there was nothing to do but marry the girl. But elementary prudence would suggest that it might be sensible to make certain the circumstances _had_ arisen, a precaution which they entirely overlooked in the mental disarray caused by Elizabeth’s regrettable dementia.