Frost and the promise of winter thrilled him now, made him think of a wild battle between St.Regis and Groton, ages ago, seven years ago--and of an autumn day in France twelve months before when he had lain in tall grass, his platoon flattened down close around him, waiting to tap the shoulders of a Lewis gunner.

He saw the two pictures together with somewhat the same primitive exaltation--two games he had played, differing in quality of acerbity, linked in a way that differed them from Rosalind or the subject of labyrinths which were, after all, the business of life.
"I am selfish," he thought.
"This is not a quality that will change when I 'see human suffering' or 'lose my parents' or 'help others.' "This selfishness is not only part of me.

It is the most living part.
"It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.
"There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use.

I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friend--all because these things may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness." The problem of evil had solidified for Amory into the problem of sex.

He was beginning to identify evil with the strong phallic worship in Brooke and the early Wells.