As he sat there, the pen lifted, his mind going back over the things that had led him away from adventure into wool, and were now leading him as far from wool as might be, he was tempted. What if, in spite of Nan, he should risk it and tell Dick, once for all, why he was going away, make it clear so there should be no after-persuasions, no clutter of half understanding? He was tired of thinking about his life as a life. The temptation to such morose musing had come upon him in the last six months, and once yielded to, he felt the egotistical disease of it through his very blood and bones. If he were Catholic, he could confess and get rid of it. He was not Catholic, only pagan, the natural man. The Church had a wisdom of her own. All her rites and ceremonies found their root in something salutary for the human mind. Confession was salutary. You might not be absolved, but if you were pagan you could believe that the very act of it absolved you. Nan said Dick never would understand. So much the better. Let him carry off the burden of it. If he understood, he'd see the extreme sacredness of a confidence entrusted to him. If he didn't, he'd hide it as a thing you'd better say as little about as possible. So he tucked his first letter into its envelope and began to write again, with no date and no direct address, but from a sense that it was going to be an enormously comforting thing to do. V "I think I'll tell you the real reason why I'm going to Wake Hill. I've told you I'm going, but just as my nerves move the muscles that move my legs to go, so my will moves my nerves and the me that is inside somewhere and is a perfect stranger to you--and also to the me I am used to myself--moves my will. You see, the me inside me knows there's something wrong. Something mighty bad--or it may be merely inevitable--has happened to me. I went through the War all right, on a pretty even keel, because I thought I saw a bright light at the end. I thought we all saw the light. And the light wasn't any electric signboard out to say there never would be any more wars, but it was a light you could see to read by. You could see the stars and see them differently from the old way we'd been seeing them. We could see the moon and the Milky Way--but I suppose that comes under stars--and the upshot of it was that we thought we saw God. And after you'd seen God, you knew saying there shouldn't be any more war was only beginning at the wrong end of the puzzle. Of course war is a damnable business, perhaps the most damnable we go into because it's so wholesale. But if you begin at the right end of the puzzle and not the wrong, the thing we learn is that the only reality in this universe for which it's worth going through the obscene hells of which war is one, is God. To be aware of Him, not to explain Him. You can't explain Him. You can't explain what He's done to you or means to do. All you can do is to keep your eye on Him and fall in.