"Perhaps they wanted to get over it. I don't want to, particularly, because life has rather lost interest for me, since I was about twenty-two; I'm afraid that was one reason I volunteered. Not very brave! I don't care now whether I live or die. I didn't care then."
"At twenty-two! Why, you weren't grown up!"
"You say that, at twenty-one?"
"It's different with a girl. I've had such a lot of things to make me feel grown up."
"So have I, God knows." (By this time he was smoking like a chimney.) "Did you lose the one thing you'd wanted in the world? But no—I mustn't ask that. I don't ask it."
"You may," I vouchsafed, charmed that—as one says of a baby—he was "beginning to take notice." "No, frankly, I didn't lose the one thing in the world I wanted most, because I've never quite known yet what I did or do want most. But not knowing leaves you at loose ends, if you're alone in the world as I am." Then, having said this, just to indicate that my circumstances conduced to tacit sympathy with his, I hopped like a sparrow to another branch of the same subject. "It's bad not to get what we want. But it's dull not to want anything."
"Is it?" Burns asked almost fiercely. "I haven't got to that yet. I wish I had. When I want a thing, it's in my nature to want it for good and all. I want the thing I wanted before the war as much now as ever. That's the principal trouble with me, I think. The hopelessness of everything. The uselessness of the things you can get."
"Can't you manage to want something you might possibly get?" I asked.
He smiled faintly. "That's much the same advice that the doctors have given—the advice this Sir Humphrey Hale of the Carstairs will give to-morrow. I'm sure. 'Try to take an interest in things as they are.' Good heavens! that's just what I can't do."
"I don't give you that advice," I said. "It's worse than useless to try and take an interest. It's stodgy. What I mean is, if an interest, alias a chance of adventure, should breeze along, don't shut the door on it. Let it in, ask it to sit down, and see how you like it. But then—maybe you wouldn't recognize it as an adventure if you saw it at the window!"