the trouble with
you, after all, is simply lack of courage?" At the start he gave, she
continued hastily, "Oh, I don't mean physical courage of course. I do
not doubt that you were as brave as a lion when it came to meeting the
Germans. But there are times when life is more terrible than the
Germans! And yet the only courage we have ever glorified is brute
courage--the courage of the lion. I know that you could face machine
guns and bayonets and all the horrors of war; but it seems to me that
you have never had really the courage of living--that you have always
been a little afraid of life."

For a long while he did not answer. His eyes were on the sky; and she
watched the expression of irritation, amazement, dread, perplexity, and
shocked comprehension, pass slowly over his features. "By Jove, I've got
a feeling that you may be right," he said at last. "You probed the
wound, and it hurt for a minute; but it may heal all the quicker for
that. You've put the whole rotten business into a nutshell. I'm a coward
at bottom, that's the trouble with me. Oh, like you, of course, I'm not
talking about actual dangers. They are easy enough, for one can see them
coming. It's not fear of the Germans. It's fear of something that one
can't touch or feel--that doesn't even exist--the fear of one's
imagination. But the truth is that I've funked things for the last year
or so. I've been in a chronic blue funk about living."

She smiled at him brightly. "It is like a bit of thistle-down. Bring it
out into the air and sunlight, and it will blow away."

"I wonder if you're right. Already I feel better because I've told you;
and yet I've gone in terror lest my mother should discover it."

When she spoke again she changed the subject as lightly as if they had
been discussing the weather. "You used to be interested in public
matters. Do you remember how you talked to me in your college days
about outstripping John in the race? You were full of ideas then, and
full of ambition too." She was touching a string that had never failed
her yet, and she waited, with an inscrutable smile, for the response.

"I know," he answered, "but that was in another life--that was before
the war."

"Do those ideas never come back to you? Have you lost your ambition?"

"I can't tell. I sometimes think that it died in France. I got to feel
over there that these political issues were merely local and temporary.
Often, the greater part of the time, I suppose, I