The Return of the Soldier

by Rebecca West

"A complete case of amnesia," he was saying as Margaret, white-lipped, yet less shy than I had ever seen her, went to a seat by the window, and I sank down on the sofa. "His unconscious self is refusing to let him resume his relations with his normal life, and so we get this loss of memory." "I've always said," declared Kitty, with an air of good sense, "that if he would make an effort—" "Effort!" He jerked his round head about. "The mental life that can be controlled by effort isn't the mental life that matters. You've been stuffed up when you were young with talk about a thing called self-control, a sort of barmaid of the soul that says, 'Time's up, gentlemen,' and 'Here, you've had enough.' There's no such thing. There's a deep self in one, the essential self, that has its wishes. And if those wishes are suppressed by the superficial self,—the self that makes, as you say, efforts, and usually makes them with the sole idea of putting up a good show before the neighbors,—it takes its revenge.