"Oh," said Dick, with a simple certainty in what he knew, "I don't blame you as I should any other fellow that wasn't going through what you are. That would be a simple matter to deal with: a chap that knew what he was doing. You don't, old man. You may not know it, but you don't."
"For the land's sake!" said Raven, echoing Charlotte, "And what, again for the land's sake, am I going through?"
"You know," said Dick uneasily because he did hope to avoid putting it into words. "Cafard."
Raven had one of his moments of silence, getting hold of himself, taking the matter in, with its forgotten enormity.
"So," he said, "you've adopted your mother's word for it. I hadn't realized that."
"Oh, Mum's no such fool," said Dick. "She may be an aggravation and a curse—I'll own that—but she's up to date. Why, Jack, anybody that ever knew you'd know you're not yourself."
"No," thought Raven, "few of us are ourselves. We've been through the War, my son. So have you; but you didn't have such a brittle old world inside you to try to put together again after it was smashed. Your inner world was in the making. Whatever you might feel in its collision with the runaway planet of the mad human mind, it could right itself; its atoms might cohere."
"You needn't think," proceeded Dick generously if a trifle too magnificently, "I can't see. There's a lot of things I see that don't bear talking about. I've pitched into you about Nan, but you needn't suppose I don't know it's all a matter of hidden complexes."
Again recurring to Charlotte in this moment of need, Raven reflected that he didn't know whether he was afoot or a-horseback.
"You don't mind, I hope," he said, with humility before this perfectly equipped intelligence, "explaining a little."