The Return of the Soldier

It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.

One forgets only those things that one wants to forget.

There's no such thing. There's a deep self in one, the essential self, that has its wishes. And if those wishes are suppressed by the superficial self,—the self that makes, as you say, efforts, and usually makes them with the sole idea of putting up a good show before the neighbors,—it takes its revenge.

Only that morning as I went through the library he had raised an appalled face from the pages of a history of the war.

"Jenny, it can't be true that they did that to Belgium? Those funny, quiet, stingy people!" And his soldierly knowledge was as deeply buried as this memory of that awful August. While her spell endured they could not send him back into the hell of war. This wonderful, kind woman held his body as safely as she held his soul.

"Jenny, is this true?"

"That Kitty's been a good wife?"

"That Kitty is my wife, that I am old, that"—he waved a hand at the altered room—"all this."