In Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s Home,” Krebs comes back from World War I disinterested in work and women. He feels disconnected from the society around him and struggles with his conflicted feelings about talking and lying about the war. Note how the narrator declares,

In this way he lost everything.

Krebs feels especially disconnected from girls in his town. He likes to watch some of them and thinks they are pretty, but he does not want to have to put in the social effort required to date one. Recall how the narrator mentions that Krebs found the girls around him better looking than French and German girls. He then says,

But the world they were in was not the world he was in. He would like to have one of them. But it was not worth it … But he would not go through all the talking. He did not want one badly enough. He liked to look at them all, though. It was not worth it. Not now when things were getting good again.

Krebs does not want to play the social games involved in courtship and deal with petty social feuds. It all seems so futile after what he has been through in the war. He cannot feign interest in the things that people who have not been to war are interested in, but at the same time, he does not want to talk about the war. This leaves him feeling isolated from those around him.