"I wanted to see it again," he said, defiantly, "because I was born there. I lived there."
She paused and stared with him, without saying anything, without any change of expression. After a time she turned.
"Have you looked enough? Shall we go back, George?"
He nodded, glancing at her wonderingly. After all, he had had very little love in his life. Mrs. Bailly, Betty——
He had never dreamed of such gratitude as this. Lambert, home with his war madness fresh upon him, must have told her, as an example of what a man might do. But was her action all gratitude? Rather wasn't it a signpost at the parting of two ages?
If that were so, he told himself, the world had left Sylvia hopelessly behind.
II
The memory of that unguarded moment remained in his mind uncomfortably. He carried it finally from the hospital to his musty apartment, where he stripped off his uniform and looked in the glass, for the first time in nearly two years his own master, no man's servant.
Was he his own master as long as he could commit such sentimental follies, as long as he could suspect that he had told Wandel the truth on the Vesle? This nostalgia must be the rebound from the war, of which he had heard so much, which made men weak, or lazy, or indifferent.
He continued to stare in the glass, angry, amazed. He had to overcome this homesick feeling. He had to prepare himself for harder battles than he had ever fought. He had had plenty of warning of the selfishness that was creeping over the world like a black pestilence. Where was his own self-will that had carried him so far?