“No, no, you could never do that.”
I waited her pleasure, wishing to speak but finding no words, afraid of the interruption which might come.
“I wonder what you were like before? I cannot see you in your home. But I feel you have changed.”
She said it without looking at me, hardly aware that she had spoken her thoughts aloud.
“Yes, great changes—so great that it is hard to look back and understand myself. The first night there on the deck—you remember—I could not sleep, and I kept going back over what I had been. You, too; I felt you were awake, feverishly awake. Was I right?” She nodded, but without looking at me. “I rebelled at going back! Oh, that’s what war does for you. Whether you hate it or love it, it ends by creating about you a new life and the other becomes something incredible, something you wish to forget, something you don’t wish to interfere with your liberty of action. For, Mademoiselle, the thing that’s hard at first is to build up for yourself a new life that will satisfy, a new philosophy; a new code of morals,—something to die with, not to live by. All that is so different from the other thing that I have seen men at my side who loved their homes shrink from opening a letter. For when you have prepared yourself to die it is hard to remember how you have lived. That was what I was rebelling against,—the thought of going back, taking up life again, only to have to go through all the mental pain of readjustment.”
“You are going back?” she said, turning to me in surprise.
“I am on a furlough only.”
“I didn’t know—I did not realize.”
“You ask if there have not been great changes in my life? Many, so that I wonder what is coming. Up to the present, my life has been without meaning, and I have only just realized it. It’s the change—the contrast: the coming back has opened my eyes. It’s been drifting—just drifting—nothing else. I don’t suppose I had an idea that was really my own or that I had thought out. Was it my fault, or the education they gave me? I don’t know. I went through school and college, with a nice collection of hand-picked acquaintances, wafted gently from one exclusive club to another. In the course of things I would have married in my own set a charming, irreproachable girl—a spoiled child, with entirely too much money—and settled down to the weary task of warding off boredom. Why I didn’t do it, I don’t know. A curious, rebellious pride, perhaps. I went abroad, to Paris, two years. Well, I came through that! I do not see them clearly yet or their relation to my life. They may have been necessary: time only will tell. I only know that the mobilization was like an escape into pure air. The rest? Just an acceptance of a thing that can’t be changed,—a happiness in finding some purpose.”