"That's the greater part of any country," Allen said, his acquired accent forgotten, his perfectly clean hands commencing to gesture.
But George wouldn't listen to him, got rid of him, turned to the wall with an ugly feeling that he had gone out of his way to nurture one of the makers of the hell after war.
PART V
THE NEW WORLD
I
George crushed his uneasy thoughts, trying to dwell instead on the idea that he was going back to the normal, but all at once he experienced a dread of the normal, perhaps, because he was no longer normal himself. Could he limp before Sylvia with his old assurance? Would people pity him, or would he irritate them because he had a disability? And snatches of his talks at the front with Wandel etched themselves sharply against his chaotic recollections of those days. Was Wandel fair? Was it, indeed, the original George Morton people had always liked? Here, apart from the turmoil, he didn't believe it, didn't dare believe it. Those people wouldn't have cared for him except for his assumption of qualities which he had chosen as from a counter display. Yet was it the real George Morton that made him in superlative moments break the traces of his acquired judgments, as he had done at New Haven, in the Argonne, to dash selflessly into the service of others? Rotten inside, indeed! Even in the hospital he set out to crush that impulsive, dangerous part of him.
But the nearer he drew to home the more he suffered from a depression that he could only define as homesickness—homesickness for the old ways, the old habits, the old thoughts; and the memory of his temerity with Sylvia at the moment of their parting was like a great cloud threatening the future with destructive storm.
Lambert, wearing a contrivance the doctors had given him in place of what the country had taken away, accompanied by Betty and the Baillys, met the transport. Betty and Mrs. Bailly cried, and George shook his heavy stick at them.