Though his plans were not definite, Pete admitted he felt he would like eventually to marry Jane. He had not weighed his chances to do so very carefully but he felt they were good, “Oh, yes indeed!” he replied, when asked if he were in love with her. As his feelings about her were discussed, it remained impossible to detect any sort of affective content to which those words might refer. The more one investigated Pete’s attitude the more strictly verbal his statement appeared. His reply was a reflex response, the carrying out of a superficially polite routine, a purely formal nod doing justice to vague conventions more or less to the effect that of course one loved a girl if he were seriously considering her for a wife. Pete approved of such conventions. Rather proudly, he denied any outstanding physical passion for her or any specific attraction of this sort. He sometimes held her hand and he kissed her goodnight. These contacts, one would judge, were little more stimulating to him than such doings between brother and sister. The ideas of kissing her as a lover would have seemed to him vaguely repellent, perhaps “common.” He was more neutral, however, than negative toward this as a possibility, and seemed pleased that he could say he had never given such things much thought. He was consecrated to higher and more practical aims.
As the discussion of his attitudes toward his girl developed, it became increasingly apparent that he neither liked nor disliked her. He had not questioned his heart particularly along these lines or so formulated it to himself, but it was plain that she was little more than something incidental in the eventualities toward which he felt himself drifting and was willing to drift. When this was suggested to him he agreed that it was correct, with no shame or sense of having been detected in anything to regret or explain.
“Many people put too much emphasis on love, it seems to me,” Pete said, not argumentatively or even with strong conviction, but somewhat gropingly, as if he were feeling his way toward some position on which he could base his comments. It was not hard to believe he might just as readily have drifted into the opposite position.
“I don’t feel the way so many other people do about love,” he continued. “Other things, it seems to me, are a lot more serious and important.” On being urged to make this point more concrete, he added: “Well, for instance, if a boy and a girl decide to marry and unite two families so they can own a good insurance business or a big pulp-wood mill.”
There was nothing that suggested active cynicism in this young man. He was shaping up something that might pass in his awareness as a sort of goal. In a sense his attitude was idealistic. It was at least the shadow or verbal form of what might be called an idealistic or “higher” type of impulse, but the shadow was, I believe, without substance. Even here one felt an affective hollowness, a lack of the energy that goes into purposive human functioning, and to such a degree as to convince one that this verbal evaluation could never muster sufficient strength, could never matter enough to him, to become a real goal or to make him work toward it consistently or with enthusiasm.
*****
His other activities, convictions, and relations, gave indications of a similar deficit in his functioning. In response to leading questions he mentioned numerous “ambitions.” He was not at all evasive and he seemed entirely unaware that his inmost self might contain anything incomplete, pathologic, or deviate. In fact, one felt that nothing could really embarrass this bright, agreeable, and poised young man.
“Another thing I’d like when I get older is to be a vestryman in the church,” he said, with what looked a bit like enthusiasm. I believe, however, that enthusiasm is a misleading word. His tone of voice, his facial expression, and the myriad other sub threshold details not clearly perceived, in which we feel out our evaluation of a person’s reactions, all suggested affect. But this affect did not, it seems, extend deeply enough into him to constitute enthusiasm or anything else that could move a person very much. Nor do I believe that what affect might have been present will be capable of directing him toward any consistent aim. A well-made cardboard box care-fully gilded could scarcely be distinguished by visual perception from a cubic yard of gold.
I do not think his expressed wish to become a vestryman can be accounted for by a desire on his part to impress people that he was penitent about the forgeries and meant to compensate for them in the future. I think this wish was as real as anything could be real for this person. It had been a feature in his plans over some years.
In discussing his motives he said, “I don’t exactly know why it seems such a good idea to be a vestryman. It just seems to me sort of pleasant and I think I’d like it. It might strike you as a little odd, too,” he continued thoughtfully, “because I’m really not very much interested in religion. Now Jack ——— and Frank ——— are terribly interested in religion. They’re all the time talking about it and bothering themselves. I’m not like that a bit. I can’t see any point in making such a commotion about something of that sort.”
To the next question he replied: “Oh I don’t mean that I don’t absolutely and completely believe every word of the Bible. And I believe everything the church teaches. Of course I believe things like that.” I hardly think he was trying to deceive me or, as this is ordinarily understood, trying to deceive himself. A person to whom rigid theological beliefs give comfort might deceive himself in order to overlook implausibility in what he would like to assume is true and might, I am sure all will agree, do so without being quite aware of it. This boy did not seem to have any such need. It seemed, with due respect to the difficulties of putting such matters into words, rather a case of there being nowhere within him any valid contrast between believing and not believing or even between a thing of this sort being so or not so.
“Probably why I want to be a vestryman,” he went on, “is because people seem to think a lot of them, consider them important, and sort of look up to them,” There was no sign of irony, playful or otherwise, toward the social group or toward himself. Sincerity is a word which for most people implies positive emotional reactions. Not merely in this boy’s superficial attitude, but in an important sense, one could say there was a striking lack of ordinary insincerity.
In discussing his relations with others he admitted a decline in his affection for his father. He expressed no negative feelings and said he felt, perhaps, he loved his father about as much as, and probably more than, one might expect of the average boy of his age. “But, being perfectly frank, I can’t say I love him the way I do my mother. I am crazy about mother. She and I are very close to each other.” By leading questions it was brought out that he estimated his love for his mother as deep and genuine. He rated it as a feeling not less strong than the maximum that an ordinary person can experience, though he was not boastful or extravagant in phrasing his replies. A few minutes later he mentioned, among other people, the mother of a male friend.
“Oh, Mrs, Blank is a wonderful person. She and I get on perfectly. She understands me. I love Mrs. Blank better than anyone.” “Do you love her better than your mother?”
“Yes,” he replied without hesitation, “I love Mrs. Blank a great deal more than I do Mother. I couldn’t love anybody as much as I do Mrs. Blank!”
He had been frequently thrown with this lady, but apparently his relations with her were superficial and there was no evidence of particular or uncommon affection on her part toward him. She had no idea that he would express himself about her in such a fashion.
A little later he said that his ideal of what a woman should be, and of the sort of wife he would like, was embodied in the fictional Scarlett O’Hara. It was pointed out that this character was thought by some to be portrayed as amazingly selfish, frigid, dishonorable, ruthless, faithless, and petty and that, furthermore, she was scarcely the sort of woman to make a husband happy. He did not deny any of this. Mrs. Blank, who in his own appraisal and in reality, was honest, faithful, gentle, and, in nearly all important respects, the opposite of Scarlett O’Hara, was now recalled to him and he was asked how he could choose both these incompatible figures as a single ideal. He then said that maybe he was mistaken about Scarlett. He had read the novel and remembered it in detail.
There was no indication in him of a reaction such as awakening to an error, or even of surprise accompanying his verbal withdrawal from his fictional heroine. He did