grown better, finer, purer.

And now for your second question, "Are you coming home as soon as you are
well again?" . . . Carley, I am well. I have delayed telling you this
because I knew you would expect me to rush back East with the telling. But--
the fact is, Carley, I am not coming--just yet. I wish it were possible
for me to make you understand. For a long time I seem to have been frozen
within. You know when I came back from France I couldn't talk. It's almost
as bad as that now. Yet all that I was then seems to have changed again. It
is only fair to you to tell you that, as I feel now, I hate the city, I
hate people, and particularly I hate that dancing, drinking, lounging set
you chase with. I don't want to come East until I am over that, you know. . .
Suppose I never get over it? Well, Carley, you can free yourself from
me by one word that I could never utter. I could never break our
engagement. During the hell I went through in the war my attachment to you
saved me from moral ruin, if it did not from perfect honor and fidelity.
This is another thing I despair of making you understand. And in the chaos
I've wandered through since the war my love for you was my only anchor. You
never guessed, did you, that I lived on your letters until I got well. And
now the fact that I might get along without them is no discredit to their
charm or to you.

It is all so hard to put in words, Carley. To lie down with death and get
up with death was nothing. To face one's degradation was nothing. But to
come home an incomprehensibly changed man--and to see my old life as
strange as if it were the new life of another planet--to try to slip into
the old groove--well, no words of mine can tell you how utterly impossible
it was.

My old job was not open to me, even if I had been able to work. The