It wasn't his experience of his sister, who he had always known of a certain exterior and cynical hardness where the emotions were concerned, that she ever wanted to 'talk about it.' But this evening she seemed queer, unlike herself, unstrung.
'Talking doesn't matter now,' said Alix, still swung between flippancy and tears. 'All the talking that matters is done already.... Basil has gone away, Nicky. He'll perhaps never come back.'
'Oh, he will. Basil does.' Nicholas looked away from her, down at the fire.
'Yes,' said Alix. 'I expect he's sure to.... I told him I cared for him,' she went on, in her clear, thin, indifferent voice, emptied of emotion. 'He doesn't care for me, you know. He pretended he hadn't understood. He pretended so hard that he broke your pipe. I was to tell you he was sorry about it—no, that he was glad, I think....' Her voice changed suddenly; anguish shook it. 'Can you make it any less bad, Nicky?' There was a pause, while Nicholas, resting his arm on the chimney-piece, stared down into the fire. He and Alix, like many brothers and sisters, had always had a shyness about them about intimate things. They were both naturally reserved; both fought shy of emotion as far as they could. They were, in some ways, very like. Despair had broken down Alix's reserve; Nicholas put his aside and considered her case in his detached way, as if it were a mathematical problem.
'Bad?' he repeated, weighing the word. 'Well, the fact is bad, of course—that you care and he doesn't. There's no altering that. It's his fault, of course, for caring himself once and leaving off. Well, anyhow, there it is. He's the poorer by it, not you.... But the other part—your telling him—isn't bad. It was merely the truth; and it's simpler and often more sensible to tell the truth about what one feels. I wouldn't mind that, if I were you. Don't bring absurdities of sex etiquette into it. They're mere conventions, after all; silly, petty, uncivilised conventions. Aren't they?'
'Perhaps,' said Alix dully. 'I don't know.'
'Well, I do. Telling the truth is all right. It oughtn't to make things worse.'
'No,' said Alix. 'It does, you know.'
Nicholas, giving the subject the attention of his careful mind, knew it did. He couldn't theorise that away.
'Well,' he said at last, slowly, 'if it does, you might quite truly look at the whole thing as a mental case; a case of nervous breakdown. The war's playing the devil with your nerves—that's what it means. You do things and feel things and say things, I dare say, that you wouldn't have once, but that you can scarcely help now. You're only one of many, you know—one of thousands. The military hospitals are full of them; men who come through plucky and grinning but with their nerves shattered to bits. There are the people, like Terry and plenty more, who come through mentally undamaged, their balance not apparently upset, and the people like John (at least I rather guessed so when I saw him) and thousands more, who—well, who don't.... War's such an insane, devilish thing; its hoofs go stamping over the world, trampling and breaking.... O Lord! I've seen so much of it; it meets one all over the place. It makes one simply sick. This affair of yours is nothing to some things I've come upon lately.... West says the same, you know. Of course, as a parson, he sees much more of people, in that way, than I do. He says lots of the quite nice, decent women he visits have taken to getting drunk at the pubs; partly they're better off than they were, of course, but it's mostly just nerves. You don't drink at pubs, do you?'