"Then, why, then," said Dick, "when a thing like this happens to you, she'd feel it, wouldn't she?" "You're perfectly sure you know what has happened to me? You trust your own diagnosis?" "Of course I trust it," Dick burst forth. "Your letter--why, your letter isn't normal. Shell shock's a perfectly legitimate thing. You know it is. You're just the one to be hit. You did perfectly crazy things over there, entirely beyond any man of your years. And I'm mighty thankful we can put our finger on it. For if it isn't shell shock, it's something worse." "You mean," said Raven, "I've gone off my nut." Dick did not answer, but there could be no doubt of his own mental excitement, and he was apprehensive in a measure that moved Raven to an amused compassion. Raven sat looking at him a long minute. Then he got up and took his newspaper from the table beside him. "Come," he said. "We'll go into the library and see if we can get anywhere." Dick followed him, and they sat down together by the fire, this after Raven had moved a third chair into the space between them. He smiled at himself as he did it. It was the chair Nan had sat in the night before. He had a foolish feeling that he was invoking her remembered presence, calling on her to help them out. "Now, Dick," he began, when they were seated, "you said something about my letter's not being normal. What is normal, when you come to that?" Dick frowned into the fire. This, he felt, had some hidden leading, and he wasn't going to be caught. "What's the use of asking fool questions?" he inquired, in his turn. "You know." "Can't help it," said Raven. "I've got to be Socratic. Help me out, old man. Let me have my little game. What is normal?" "Why," said Dick, floundering, "I suppose it's what the general run of people think--and do. It's keeping to the rules. It's trotting on the course. It isn't going off at some tangent of your own." Dick felt rather proud of this, its fluency and general appositeness. He plucked up his spirits, thinking he might be going to manage Raven, after all. "Now, see here," said Raven, suddenly leaning forward and looking at him in the friendliest community of feeling, "it means a good deal when a fellow of my years, as you say, gets a biff that sends him staggering." "Just what I said," Dick assured him. "It's mighty serious. It's awful." "Has it occurred to you," said Raven, "that I may be right?" "Right? How right?" Thereupon question and answer piled up fast. "I've indicted the universe, as it were. How can you prove the universe hasn't laid herself open to it? How do you know the indictment of the creature she made and then ground under her heel isn't the very thing she's been waiting for all these millions of years?" "Oh, come, Jack! the universe hasn't been waiting for you. That's a part of it, don't you see? You've got delusions, delusions of greatness, delusions----"