."

"That's rank materialism."

"Bosh! it's common sense. Look at your own case! Do you never
analyze your own behaviour? You would if you lay on your back
year in year out like me. You're maimed too."

"No, am I?" Val reached for a fourth cushion. "Think o' that,
now."

"Or you wouldn't be content to hang on in Chilmark, riding over
another man's property and squiring another man's wife. The shot
that broke your arm broke your life. You had the makings of a
fine soldier in you, but you were knocked out of your profession
and you don't care for any other. With all your ability you'll
never be worth more than six or seven hundred a year, for you've
no initiative and you're as nervous as a cat. You're not married
and you'll never marry: you're too passive, too continent, too
much of a monk to attract a healthy woman. No: don't you flatter
yourself that you've escaped any more than I have. The only
difference is that the Saxons mucked up my life and you've mucked
up your own. You fool! you high-minded, over-scrupulous
fool! . . . You and I are wreckage of war, Val: cursed, senseless
devilry of war.-- Go and play a tune, I'm sick of talking."

Val was not any less sick of listening. He went to the piano,
but not to play a tune. Impossible to insult that crippled
tempest on the sofa with the sweet eternal placidities of Mozart
or Bach. His fingers wandered over the lower register,
improvising, modulating from one minor key to another in a cobweb
of silver harmony spun pale and low from a minimum of technical
attention. For once Bernard had struck home. "The shot that
broke your arm broke your life." Stripped of Bernard's rhetoric,
was it true?

Val could not remember the time when his ambition had not been
set on soldiering: regiments of Hussars and Dragoons had deployed
on his earliest Land of Counterpane: he had never cared for any
other toys. But as soon as war was over he had resigned his
commission, a high sense of duty driving him from a field in
which he felt unfit to serve. He had pitilessly executed his own
judgment: no man can do more. But what if in judgement itself
had been unhinged--warped--deflected by the interaction of
splintered bone and cut sinew and dazed, ghost-ridden mind? Have
not psychologists said that few fighting men were strictly normal
in or for some time after the war?

If that were true, Val had wasted the best years of his life on a
delusion. It was a disturbing