"You've forgotten."
"I don't mean that, either."
Silence.
"Look here, Anne, I want to know about Colin. Has he been very bad?"
"Yes, he has."
"How bad?"
"So bad that sometimes I was glad you weren't there to see him. You remember when he was a kid, how frightened he used to be at night. Well, he's been like that all the time. He's like that now, only he's a bit better. He doesn't scream now…. All the time he kept on worrying about you. He only told me that the other day. He seemed to think the war must have done something more frightful to you than it had done to him; he said, because you'd mind it more. I told him it wasn't the sort of thing you'd mind most."
"It isn't the sort of thing it's any good minding. I don't suppose I minded more than the other chaps. If anything had happened to you, or him, or Eliot, I'd have minded that."
"I know. That's what I told him. I knew you'd come through."
"Eliot was dead right about Colin. He knew he wouldn't. He ought never to have gone out."