"I don't, then," said Dick, gruffly in his turn. "It's been an eye-opener, the whole business."
"What has?"
"This." He evidently meant his own hurt and the general viewpoint induced by it. "I'm not going to stay round here, you know," he continued, presenting this as a proposition he had got to state abruptly or not at all.
"Why not?"
"I don't believe I could say," Dick temporized, in a way that suggested he didn't mean to try. "There's Mum, you know. She's going to be at me again to go in for my degree. Oh, yes, she will, soon as she thinks I won't come unglued. Well, I don't want it. I simply don't. And I don't want what she calls a profession: any old thing, you know, so long as it's a profession. I couldn't go in for that either, Jack. If I do anything, it's got to be on my own, absolutely on my own. Fact is, I'd like to go back to France."
"Reconstruction?" Raven suggested, after a minute.
"Maybe. Not that I'm specially valuable. Only it would be something to get my teeth into."
Was this, too, Raven wondered, an aftermath of the War? Had it shaken the atoms of his young purpose too far astray for them ever to cohere again? Dick had had one purpose. Even that didn't seem to be surviving, in any operative form.
"Writing?" he suggested. "Oxford—and poetry?"
Dick shook his head.