CONRAD NORMAN
Even when I received a letter from her, asking how Con was doing, I took it merely as more of her "unmerciful compassion," sent her an account of him, and inclosed her letter in an envelope to Conrad Norman in care of the Domino Film Company. She wrote, it seemed to me, in a tone of war weariness; but that was natural. She said something about England being changed, life there a tragedy, the war a "dreadful oppression." I did not wish to blame her, but I felt that if she was unhappy she had no right to imply that I was responsible—by writing to me for sympathy.
What I did not understand was this: England had been to her a home of dreams, a place of refuge in her mind from all the realities of poverty and Centerbrook. Her father and mother talked of it as Adam and Eve might have recalled better days in Eden. All her English novels painted it in imaginative colors, in "the light that never was"; and she went to it as an escape from life, from the hopelessness of her affection for Con Gorman and the sight of his misery. And she found that England was "changed," that life there was full of the most terrible realities of death and war, that she had not escaped, that even the unhappiness of Centerbrook looked like comparative peace and quiet.
This, as I say, is what I did not understand. I did not understand it till she told me of it herself, not very lucidly, sitting over our coffee-cups after
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