These slight changes in her he noticed, but they troubled him little, principally because he was coming to realize the great change in himself. More and more that change was forcing itself upon him. The stories and novels he had read during the first years of the war, the stories by English writers in which young men, frivolous and inconsequential, had enlisted and fought and emerged from the ordeal strong, purposeful and “made-over”—those stories recurred to him now. He had paid little attention to the “making-over" idea when he read those tales, but now he was forced to believe there might be something in it. Certainly something, the three years or the discipline and training and suffering, or all combined, had changed him. He was not as he used to be. Things he liked very much he no longer liked at all. And where, oh where, was the serene self-satisfaction which once was his?
The change must be quite individual, he decided. All soldiers were not so affected. Take Blanchard, for instance. Blanchard had seen service, more and quite as hard fighting as he had seen, but Blanchard was, to all appearances, as light-hearted and serene and confident as ever. Blanchard was like Madeline; he was much the same now as he had been before the war. Blanchard could dance and talk small talk and laugh and enjoy himself. Well, so could he, on occasions, for that matter, if that had been all. But it was not all, or if it was why was he at other times so discontented and uncomfortable? What was the matter with him, anyway?
He drew more and more into his shell and became more quiet and less talkative. Madeline, in one of her moods, reproached him for it.
“I do wish you wouldn't be grumpy,” she said.
They had been sitting in the library and he had lapsed into a fit of musing, answering her questions with absentminded monosyllables. Now he looked up.
“Grumpy?” he repeated. “Was I grumpy? I beg your pardon.”
“You should. You answered every word I spoke to you with a grunt or a growl. I might as well have been talking to a bear.”
“I'm awfully sorry, dear. I didn't feel grumpy. I was thinking, I suppose.”
“Thinking! You are always thinking. Why think, pray? . . . If I permitted myself to think, I should go insane.”
“Madeline, what do you mean?”