Eric

“Oh, don’t you see, M. Poirot, it’s all so difficult. It isn't a question of David at all. It’s me! I’ve changed. I’ve been away for three—four years. Now I’ve come back I’m not the same person who went away. That’s the tragedy everywhere. People coming home changed, having to readjust themselves. You can’t go away and lead a different kind of life and not change!’

‘You are wrong,’ said Poirot. ‘The tragedy of life is that people do not change.’

She stared at him, shaking her head. He insisted:

‘But yes. It is so. Why did you go away in the first place?’

‘Why? I went into the Wrens. I went on service.’

‘Yes, yes, but why did you join the Wrens in the first place? You were engaged to be married. You were in love with Rowley Cloade. You could have worked, could you not, as a land girl, here in Warmsley Vale?’

‘I could have, I suppose, but I wanted—’

‘You wanted to get away. You wanted to go abroad, to see life. You wanted, perhaps, to get away from Rowley Cloade … And now you are restless, you still want—to get away! Oh, no, Mademoiselle, people do not change!’

‘When I was out East, I longed for home,’ Lynn cried defensively.

‘Yes, yes, where you are not, there you will want to be! That will always be so, perhaps, with you. You make a picture to yourself, you see, a picture of Lynn Marchmont coming home … But the picture does not come true, because the Lynn Marchmont whom you imagine is not the real Lynn Marchmont. She is the Lynn Marchmont you would like to be.’

Lynn asked bitterly:

‘So, according to you, I shall never be satisfied anywhere?’

‘I do not say that. But I do say that, when you went away, you were dissatisfied with your engagement, and that now you have come back, you are still dissatisfied with your engagement.”
― Agatha Christie, Taken at the Flood