ach
other. If he should die--feeling that way--!

DR. JONATHAN. George hasn't lost his affection for you; if it were so,
we shouldn't have that symptom. I will tell you, briefly, my theory of
the case. But first let me say, in justice to Frye, that he was in no
position to know certain facts that give the clue to George's condition
the mental history.

ASHER. I don't understand.

DR. JONATHAN. The day he left home, for France, certain things happened
to him to arouse his sympathy with what we call working people, their
lives and aspirations. As you know, George has a very human side,--he
loves his fellow men. He'd never thought of these things before. He
went with them, naturally, to you, and I infer that you suppressed him!

ASHER. I told him I couldn't discuss certain aspects. His emotional
state troubled me,--he was going away, and I imagined he would get over
it.

DR. JONATHAN. He didn't get over it. It was an emotional crisis. He
left home with a conflict in his mind,--a conflict between his affection
for you and that which he had suddenly come to see was right. I mean,
right for today, for the year and hour in which we are living. This
question of the emancipation of labour began a hundred years ago, with
the introduction of machinery and the rise of modern industry, and in
this war it has come to a head. Well, as the time approached for George
to risk his life for his new beliefs, his mental conflict deepened. He
talked with other young men who believed they were fighting for the same
cause. And then--it must have been shortly before he was wounded--he
wrote you that appeal.

ASHER. The letter I read to you!

DR. JONATHAN. The fact that in his own home, in the shops which bore his
name, no attempt had been made to meet the new issues for which he was
going into battle, weighed upon him. Then came the shell that shattered
his body. But the probabilities are that he was struck down,
unconscious, at the very moment when the conflict in his mind was most
acute. He was thinking of you, of the difference you and he had had, he
was lonely, he was afraid for the bravest men feel fear. To him the
bursting of the shell was the bursting of the conflict within him. I
won't go into the professional side of the matter, the influence of the
mental state on the physical--but after the wound healed, whenever
anything occurred to remind him of the conflict,--a letter from you, the
sight of the strikers this afternoon at t