She was determined to hammer at the point, it seemed. He wished that she would stop.
“There wasn’t, Miss Roberts.”
“Then you don’t know much about soldiers.”
“No, not much, really.”
“I don’t mean soldiers—or the war itself, either. It’s a state of being—a sort of lucid abnormality. It’s hard to tell you just what I do mean. But it’s the thing,” she ended fiercely, “that made me understand Mr. Endicott. He never quite recovered, you see, from being a soldier.”
“And perhaps it also made you understand why Mrs. Endicott misunderstood him?”
Things were going better now; the channel was broadening into useful seas.
“Of course it was,” Roberts said. “She, too, lost no one in the war.”
The fog rolled in again.
“I’m afraid I’m not following you very clearly.”
“It’s quite useless, Lieutenant—simply that in Mr. Endicott I kept seeing my brother. I suffered for him to the extent I would have suffered for my brother had my brother been in similar circumstances.”
“Suffered?”
“Yes, suffered. From her damned superiority.”
“You think that Mrs. Endicott overdid the mental?”