He was a fabulous monster not because he was honourable and virtuous. She had known several very honourable and very virtuous men. If she had never known an honourable or virtuous woman except among her French or Austrian friends, that was, no doubt, because virtuous and honourable women did not amuse her or because, except just for the French and Austrians, they were not Roman Catholics. . . . But the honourable and virtuous men she had known had usually prospered and been respected. They weren't the great fortunes, but they were well-offish: well spoken of: of the country gentleman type . . . Tietjens. . . . She arranged her thoughts. To get one point settled in her mind, she asked: "What really happened to you in France? What is really the matter with your memory? Or your brain, is it?" He said carefully: "It's half of it, an irregular piece of it, dead. Or rather pale. Without a proper blood supply. . . . So a great portion of it, in the shape of memory, has gone." She said: "But _you_! . . . without a brain! . . ." As this was not a question he did not answer. His going at once to the telephone, as soon as he was in the possession of the name "Metternich," had at last convinced her that he had not been, for the last four months, acting hypochondriacal or merely lying to obtain sympathy or extended sick leave. Amongst Sylvia's friends a wangle known as shell-shock was cynically laughed at and quite approved of. Quite decent and, as far as she knew, quite brave menfolk of her women would openly boast that, when they had had enough of it over there, they would wangle a little leave or get a little leave extended by simulating this purely nominal disease, and in the general carnival of lying, lechery, drink and howling that this affair was, to pretend to a little shell-shock had seemed to her to be almost virtuous. At any rate if a man passed his time at garden parties--or, as for the last months Tietjens had done, passed his time in a tin hut amongst dust heaps, going to tea every afternoon in order to help Mrs. Wannop with her newspaper articles--when men were so engaged they were, at least, not trying to kill each other. She said now: "Do you mind telling me what actually happened to you?" He said: "I don't know that I can very well. . . . Something burst--or 'exploded' is probably the right word--near me, in the dark. I expect you'd rather not hear about it? . . ." "I want to!" Sylvia said. He said: "The point about it is that I _don't_ know what happened and I don't remember what I did. There are three weeks of my life dead. . . . What I remember is being in a C.C.S. and not being able to remember my own name." "You _mean_ that?" Sylvia asked. "It's not just a way of talking?" "No, it's not just a way of talking," Tietjens answered. "I lay in bed in the C.C.S. . . . Your friends were dropping bombs on it." "You might not call them my friends," Sylvia said. Tietjens said: