Thought Patricia, “He’s been home half a day and he hasn’t even kissed me yet!”
Nevertheless, she pulled herself together. He had come home “on business”; and he must be allowed to settle his business in his own way. He looked thinner, she thought: and it seemed to her a shame that he should be worried with money-matters when his real work lay elsewhere, at the front.
She let him talk himself into optimism; admired the ultimate philosophy with which he said: “Anyway, it’s only temporary. One doesn’t alter a deal by talking round it. Jamesons will have to go. Let it! Once this war’s over, I’ll get into business again. And then, then, my dear, you’ll see me make things hum.”
He paid for tea; insisted on driving home himself. They spun out of twilit country into the blueing gloom of war-time London; made Harley Street in time for dinner.
The children, who had waited up for his return, greeted their father uproariously; could hardly be induced to bed. Later Heron Baynet produced Clicquot, a decanter of special brandy. The three of them made semblance of enjoyment. Peter told them how he had wangled his leave; Patricia broached a plan long contemplated—the taking of a little place in the country; her father spoke, as always, of his work.
The little consultant with the lined face and the kind eyes was one of the only three men in England who had made any study of war’s effect on the fighting man’s nerves. Already, in the card-index on the table in his consulting-room, he had tabulated five hundred cases; and from those five hundred cases, a theory had begun to evolve itself—a theory of eminent simplicity. Heron Baynet called it, “The Curve of the Limit of Human Endurance.”
The curve and the limit of each individual varied, were affected by conditions—physical, mental, and sexual, conditions of heredity and conditions of pre-war environment. But of one thing, Heron Baynet already held the absolute certainty:—The superman, as preached by German philosophers, did not exist. Every human individuality possessed its breaking-strain, the point beyond which will-power could not force either the body or the brain. Any attempt to pass that “limit of human endurance” must be foredoomed to failure.
And it seemed to Heron Baynet, sitting alone after the two had gone to bed, that he could already detect from certain tones in his son-in-law’s voice, from the way his conversation ran from one topic to another, from the whole atmosphere his personality exuded, that Peter Jameson had already abandoned the flat level of the normal, begun the slow climb up that curve of endurance which must lead eventually to breaking point. . . .