ing to be."

"You're lucky to have found it out," George said, "for your job's about
over. Of course I could get you something in Wall Street."

"Doubt if I should want it," Allen said. "I've always got my old job."

George whistled.

"You mean you'd go back to long hair, cheap clothes, and violent words?"

"Why not? I only took your offer, Morton, because I was inclined to
agree with you that in the outside world's anxiety to look at what was
going on over the fence people'd stop thinking. Russia didn't stop
thinking, and after the armistice you watch America begin to use its
brain."

"You mean the downtrodden," George sneered.

"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