But with the middle of spring came three months of storm and stress in the Virginia peninsula. He came out of the ranks by reason of some inscrutable opinion of him conceived and reported to authorities--something connected with an expedition through a swamp--was promoted because there were no other officers to speak of in the company when the army reached its new base at last on the James River. He looked back curiously now to the tumult of those weeks, a period when he could not remember to have remembered himself, a long night of irrelevant dreams, the sense of identity lost in the dull confusion, himself going and coming, ordering and obeying, seeing difficulties and finding solutions with a set of surface faculties, the soul within him torpid, at least taciturn. The experience had left him with a sense of distaste and humiliation, with a certain troubled doubt. Was a man captain of himself, if he could be seized, stunned, drowned in circumstance, lost like a drop of water in a flood, rendered indistinct to his own consciousness from the flowing, pouring mass around him? Gard did not suppose himself to be unique. He supposed other men had similar paths to walk in, pilgrim fashion; that every man owned merely himself and his destiny, his issue in the nature of things his own; that to every man there was but one great distinction, it lying between himself and what was not himself. In his own age, at least, he supposed it a growing tendency for men to look within their own souls for the infinite which they could not find without. There was no doubt the peninsular campaign had been an experience affecting him profoundly. It had shown him what a pit of danger lay on the side of such absorption; that to plunge into affairs so intense, so physical, so powerful in their sweep and pull, was for the individualist numbing, miasmic, clouding the eye whose function should be to see one path clearly. It had given him a new sense and a certain dread of the strength of what lay on the other side of that distinction between himself and the not himself. It had left in him, he fancied, a kind of sediment, an element in respect to which it became illustrated that what a man has experienced is a part of him. It had made him perhaps more consciously watchful of his poise, his mental erectness and control. But the main result so far had been that sense of uncertainty and troubled doubt, as if he had lost the trail, as if much had grown dim that was once definite and guiding. Mavering's appearance seemed to suggest something, a clew or an omen. Jack, at least, was individual, nomadic, and distinct. He never let his surroundings grow into him.