"I was afraid you were getting some such bug in your head."
Bob limped to a table on which he had thrown his hat and the stick that helped his lameness.
People at Marillo Park, where the Collinghams lived for most of the year, said that, with the wounds he had got while in the French army in the early days of the war, he had brought back with him a real enhancement of manhood. Having come through Groton and Harvard little better than an uncouth boy, his experience in France had shaped his outlook on life into something like a purpose. It was not very clear as yet, or sharply defined; but he knew that certain preliminary conditions must be met before he could settle down. One of these had to do with Miss Jennie Follett; and what Hubert called "a bug in his head" was, in his own mind, at least, as vital to his development as his braving his family in going to the war.
That had been in the famous year when the American nation was trying to be "neutral in thought." "I'm not neutral in thought," Bob, who had only that summer left Harvard, had declared to his father. "I'm not neutral in any way. Give me my ticket over, dad, and I'll do the rest myself."
He got his ticket over, and fifteen months later, bandaged and crippled, a ticket back. On the return voyage he had as his companion a young American stretcher-man who had helped to carry him off the battlefield, and who, a few weeks later, nervously shattered, had joined him in the hospital. Wray, who, on the outbreak of war, had been painting in Latoul's atelier, had now got what he called "a sickener of Europe," and was glad to hang out his shingle in New York. A New England man of Gallicized ways of thinking, he had means enough to wait for recognition, so long as he kept his expenses within relatively narrow bounds.
With his soft hat plastered provisionally on the back of his head, Bob leaned heavily on his stick.
"I've got to marry some one," he said, as if in self-defense. "I'm that kind. I can't begin fitting my jig saw together till I do it."
Wray kept on painting.
"Why don't you pick out a girl in your own class? Lots of nice ones at Marillo."
"You don't marry girls just because they're nice, old thing. You take the one who's the other half of yourself."