"It is twelve o'clock; you have been sleeping since seven last night. Let me see if you can stand. Get up."
She obeyed meekly. She had no desire to do anything but what she was told. Her mental condition was one of complete dependence, and had she been left to herself she would have been content to lie down again.
Yet she felt for a moment a most intense desire to propound some sort of plan which would give this man the money without going through a marriage ceremony. That desire lasted a minute and was succeeded by an added weariness as though this effort at independent thought had added a new burden to her strength. She knew and was mildly amazed at the knowledge that she was under the influence of a drug which was destroying her will, yet she felt no particular urge to make a fight for freedom of determination. "Freedom of determination." She repeated the words, having framed her thoughts with punctilious exactness, and remembered that that was a great war phrase which one was constantly discovering in the newspapers. All her thoughts were like this—they had the form of marshalled language, so that even her speculations were punctuated.
"Walk over to the window," said the doctor, and she obeyed, though her knees gave way with every step she took. "Now come back—good, you're all right."
She looked at him, and did not flinch when he laid his two hands on her shoulders.
"You are going to be married this afternoon—that's all right, isn't it? "
"Yes," she said, "that is all right."
"And you'll say 'yes' when I tell you to say 'yes,' won't you?"
"Yes, I'll say that," she said.
All the time she knew that this was monstrously absurd. All the time she knew that she did not wish to marry this man. Fine sentences, pompously framed, slowly formed in her mind such as: "This outrage will not go unpunished, comma, and you will suffer for this, comma, Dr. van Heerden, full stop."
