"He did. He wanted you--'frightfully'--all the time. He went to pieces if you weren't there. Don't you know why he took you out with him everywhere? Because if he hadn't he couldn't have driven half a mile out of Ghent." "That's one of the things I'm trying to forget." "It's one of the things you should try to remember." He grasped her arm. "And, Charlotte, look here. I want you to forgive him. For your own sake." She stiffened under his touch, his look, his voice of firm, intimate authority. His insincerity repelled her. "Why should you? You don't care about him. You don't care about me. If I was blown to bits to-morrow you wouldn't care." He laughed his mirthless, assenting laugh. "You don't care about people at all. You only care about their diseases and their minds and things." "I think I care a little about the wounded." "You don't really. Not about _them_. You care about getting in more of them and quicker than any other field ambulance on the front. I can't think why you're bothering about me now." "That's why. If I'm to get in more wounded I can't have anybody in my corps who isn't fit." "_I'm_ fit. What's the matter with me?" "Not much. Your body's all right. And your mind _was_ all right till Conway upset it. Now it's unbalanced." "Unbalanced?" "Just the least little bit. There's a fight going on in it between your feeling for Conway and your knowledge of him." "I've told you I haven't any feeling." "Your memory of your feeling then. Same thing. You know he was cruel and a liar and a coward. And you loved him. With you those two states are incompatible. They struggle. And that's bad for you. If it goes on you'll break down. If it stops you'll be all right.... The way to stop it is to know the _truth_ about Conway. The truth won't clash with your feeling." "Don't I know it?" "Not all. Not the part that matters most. You know he was all wrong morally. You don't know _why_.... Conway was an out and out degenerate. He couldn't help _that_. He suffered from some physical disability. It went through everything. It made him so that he couldn't live a man's life. He was afraid to enter a profession. He was afraid of women." "He wasn't afraid of me. Not in the beginning." "Because he felt your strength. You're very strong, Charlotte. You gave him your strength. And he could _feel_ passion, mind you, though he couldn't act it.... I suppose he could feel courage, too, only somehow he couldn't make it work. Have you got it clear?" She nodded. So clear that it seemed to her he was talking about a thing she had known once and had forgotten. All the time she had known John's secret. She knew what would come next: McClane's voice saying, "Well then, think--think," and his excited gestures, bobbing forward suddenly from the hips. He went on.