an now. And my love for you is
different. Let me assure you that it has been about all left to me of
what is noble and beautiful. Whatever the changes in me for the worse,
my love for you, at least, has grown better, finer, purer.

And now for your second question, "Are you coming home as soon as you
are well again?"... Carley, I am well. I have delayed telling you this
because I knew you would expect me to rush back East with the telling.
But--the fact is, Carley, I am not coming--just yet. I wish it were
possible for me to make you understand. For a long time I seem to have
been frozen within. You know when I came back from France I couldn't
talk. It's almost as bad as that now. Yet all that I was then seems to
have changed again. It is only fair to you to tell you that, as I
feel now, I hate the city, I hate people, and particularly I hate that
dancing, drinking, lounging set you chase with. I don't want to come
East until I am over that, you know... Suppose I never get over it?
Well, Carley, you can free yourself from me by one word that I could
never utter. I could never break our engagement. During the hell I went
through in the war my attachment to you saved me from moral ruin, if it
did not from perfect honor and fidelity. This is another thing I despair
of making you understand. And in the chaos I've wandered through since
the war my love for you was my only anchor. You never guessed, did you,
that I lived on your letters until I got well. And now the fact that I
might get along without them is no discredit to their charm or to you.

It is all so hard to put in words, Carley. To lie down with death and
get up with death was nothing. To face one's degradation was nothing.
But to come home an incomprehensibly changed man--and to see my old life
as strange as if it were the new life of another planet--to try to slip
into the old groove--well, no words of mine can tell you how utterly
impossible it was.

My old job was not open to me, even if I had been able to work. The
government that I fought for left me to starve, or to die of my maladies
like a dog, for all it cared.

I could not live on your money, Carley. My people are poor, as you know.
So there was nothing for me to do but to borrow a little money from my
friends and to come West. I'm glad I had the courage to come. What
this West is I'll never try to tell you, because, loving the luxury and
excitement and glitter of the city as you do, you'd think I wa