“To keep me off him?”

“To keep you off him.”

“I see....  The middle one was funny.  It happened.  The day we were in Bruges.  But I can’t make out the first one with that awful woman in it.”

“You may have been dreaming something out of his past.  Something he remembered.”

“Well anyhow I don’t understand the last one.”

“I do.”

“But I dreamed he wanted me.  Frightfully.  And he didn’t.”

“He did.  He wanted you—­’frightfully’—­all the time.  He went to pieces if you weren’t there.  Don’t you know why he took you out with him everywhere?  Because if he hadn’t he couldn’t have driven half a mile out of Ghent.”

“That’s one of the things I’m trying to forget.”

“It’s one of the things you should try to remember.”

He grasped her arm.

“And, Charlotte, look here.  I want you to forgive him.  For your own sake.”

She stiffened under his touch, his look, his voice of firm, intimate authority.  His insincerity repelled her.

“Why should you?  You don’t care about him.  You don’t care about me.  If I was blown to bits to-morrow you wouldn’t care.”

He laughed his mirthless, assenting laugh.

“You don’t care about people at all.  You only care about their diseases and their minds and things.”

“I think I care a little about the wounded.”

“You don’t really.  Not about them.  You care about getting in more of them and quicker than any other field ambulance on the front.  I can’t think why you’re bothering about me now.”

“That’s why.  If I’m to get in more wounded I can’t have anybody in my corps who isn’t fit.”

“I’m fit.  What’s the matter with me?”

“Not much.  Your body’s all right.  And your mind was all right till Conway upset it.  Now it’s unbalanced.”

“Unbalanced?”

“Just the least little bit.  There’s a fight going on in it between your feeling for Conway and your knowledge of him.”

“I’ve told you I haven’t any feeling.”

“Your memory of your feeling then.  Same thing.  You know he was cruel and a liar and a coward.  And you loved him.  With you those two states are incompatible.  They struggle.  And that’s bad for you.  If it goes on you’ll break down.  If it stops you’ll be all right....  The way to stop it is to know the truth about Conway.  The truth won’t clash with your feeling.”

“Don’t I know it?”

“Not all.  Not the part that matters most.  You know he was all wrong morally.  You don’t know why....  Conway was an out and out degenerate.  He couldn’t help that.  He suffered from some physical disability.  It went through everything.  It made him so that he couldn’t live a man’s life.  He was afraid to enter a profession.  He was afraid of women.”

“He wasn’t afraid of me.  Not in the beginning.”