"Terry, it was sentimental blackmail. I'm sorry."
"What was? I don't understand."
"That last letter. I oughtn't to have reminded you. What one promises at seventeen doesn't hold good. It was sporting of you to keep the promise by meeting me this morning, but—— What I'm trying to say is this; I'm forgetting everything that you would like me to forget."
"But I'm not sure that I want you to forget any
thing." She widened her lips into a smile from which the trouble was only half dispelled. "It sounds horrid and unfriendly, this talk of forgetting, as though—— It sounds so much worse when it's put into words, as though we had something of which to be ashamed."
"No, it's not like that. May I be terrifically honest—just as we used?"
She eyed him doubtfully. It was evident that she was still timid of the truth. Then she nodded.
"Well, you know how it was between us before I went away. You were of an age when most people still thought of you as a child. You were outwardly, but inside you were almost a woman. The little girl did things and promised things that the woman wouldn't approve to-day. And then take my side of it. I went out to a place where life seemed at an end and where, because of that, one became selfish in the demands he made on the people whom he had left behind—especially on the women. It was impossible to be normal; probably I'm not quite normal now. But the point is this: every man in khaki thought intensely of some one girl. It didn't matter whether he had the right to think of her; he just thought of her, and wrote to her, and carried her photo with him up to an attack, as if he had the right. He wasn't even much disturbed as to whether, in allowing him to love her, she loved him in return or was merely being patriotic; he didn't expect to live to put things to a test. All he wanted was the belief that one woman loved him. You understand, she was very often only a makeshift—a sym
bol for the woman he would have married if death hadn't been in such a hurry. Well, for some of us Death has had time to spare and we've come back—come back starved, emotional, tyrannic—passionate to possess all the things for which our hearts have hungered and of which they have been deprived so long. It was easy to strip ourselves of everything when we thought we were going to die. But now that we know we're going to live we're tempted to recover some of our lost years by violence. You must be patient with us, Terry; we're sick children, querulous, eager to take offense and over-exacting. I was like that when I blackmailed you into meeting me this morning. It was unworthy of me to have treated that child's promise as binding."
"But I was seventeen; I wasn't a child. And I wanted to meet you—I did truly."