Karen sent the clipping to him. “You can see now that you can’t protect us from what you are doing or the dangers that you are facing. There are some functions as a wife I can still fulfill, and if you feel you want to, write all that you have on your mind to me. You’re older than you were after the robbery at the auto store, but I know you and what you’re thinking about. Perhaps better than you I know why you have done so well over there, and it isn’t only because of your eyesight or nervous system. You couldn’t do the same outside the frame of public service. Think and see if I am not right. No need to tell you we are all very, very proud. Please, please take care. You know me, too, and you know what is in my heart—all the time, every day and every night.”

There was nothing he wanted to put down in writing. He had seen bodies and fragments of bodies falling out of the sky and he did not want Karen to have a picture of it. The newspapers liked to write that the fighter pilots were the last soldiers fighting man-to-man, and more than in any other part of the war it was true, but the net effect, day after day, was more like that of a gigantic killing ground. It showed them all that daylight bombing was a disaster of the first magnitude. That the war in the air was not the romantic tournament the newspapers were saying it was, was reason enough not to try to correct the impressions at home. If the Port Smith papers had fixed on him as the personification of a lie, and he hated it, he had to be glad that he was being protected from having to tell the truth. Karen could see into him, but only if he helped her. He did not want to write about the truth, so he did not, and he wrote about the things that came to him readily when he sat down to write.