“Why shouldn’t you be bored,” yawned Tom. “Isn’t that the conventional frame of mind for the young man of your age and condition?”
“Yes,” said Amory speculatively, “but I’m more than bored; I am restless.”
“Love and war did for you.”
“Well,” Amory considered, “I’m not sure that the war itself had any great effect on either you or me—but it certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation.”
Tom looked up in surprise.
“Yes it did,” insisted Amory. “I’m not sure it didn’t kill it out of the whole world. Oh, Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader—and now even a Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn’t be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world. Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger—”
“I don’t agree with you,” Tom interrupted. “There never were men placed in such egotistic positions since—oh, since the French Revolution.”
Amory disagreed violently.
“You’re mistaking this period when every nut is an individualist for a period of individualism. Wilson has only been powerful when he has represented; he’s had to compromise over and over again. Just as soon as Trotsky and Lenin take a definite, consistent stand they’ll become merely two-minute figures like Kerensky. Even Foch hasn’t half the significance of Stonewall Jackson. War used to be the most individualistic pursuit of man, and yet the popular heroes of the war had neither authority nor responsibility: Guynemer and Sergeant York. How could a schoolboy make a hero of Pershing? A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.”
“Then you don’t think there will be any more permanent world heroes?”