nto thin channels. It was as
though there were at hand a great reservoir of thought, of experience,
of deep gropings into the very well-springs of life, which none of them
dared to tap lest it should rush out and overwhelm them. They seemed in
some strange awe of its presence, and spoke, when they spoke at all, of
trivial things. Grant proved uncommunicative, and perhaps, in a sense,
disappointing. He preferred to forget both the glories and the horrors
of war; when he drew on his experience at all it was to relate some
humorous incident. That, it seemed, was all he cared to remember. He
was conscious of a restraint which hedged him about and hampered every
mental deployment.

Phyllis, too, must have been conscious of that restraint, for before
they parted she said something about human minds being like pianos,
which get out of tune for lack of the master-touch....

When Grant found himself in the street air again he was almost swallowed
up in the rush of things which he might have said. His mental machinery,
which seemed to have been out of mesh,--came back into adjustment with
a jerk. He suddenly discovered that he could think; he could drive his
mind from his own batteries. In soldiering the mind is driven from the
batteries of the rank higher up. The business of discipline is to make
man an automatic machine rather than a thinking individual. It seemed
to Grant that in that moment the machine part of him gave way and the
individual was restored. In his case the change came in a moment; he had
been re-tuned; he was able to think logically in terms of civil life.
He pieced together Murdoch's conversation. "Not as a jump," Murdoch had
said, when he had argued that a man cannot emerge in a moment from the
psychology of the trenches to that of the counting-house. Undoubtedly
that would be true of the mass; they would experience no instantaneous
readjustment....

There are moments when the mind, highly vitalized, reaches out into the
universe of thought and grasps ideas far beyond its conscious intention.
All great thoughts come from uncharted sources of inspiration, and it
may be that the function of the mind is not to create thought, but
only to record it. To do so it must be tuned to the proper key of
receptivity. Grant had a consciousness, as he walked along the deserted
streets toward his hotel, that he was in that key; the quietness, the
domesticity of Murdoch's home, the loveliness of Phyllis Bruce, had,
for the