He sat pondering over the many-horned dilemma upon which he hung impaled.  He had done all that a man could do.  He had given the best that was in him, played the game faithfully, according to the rules.  And the net result had been for him the most complete disaster.  So far as Myra went, he recognized that domestic tragedy as a natural consequence.  He did not know, he was unable to say if his wife had simply been a weak and shallow woman, left too long alone, thrown too largely on her own resources in an environment so strongly tinctured by the high-pitched and reckless spirit generated by the war.  He had always known that his wife—­women generally were the same, he supposed—­was dominated by emotional urges, rather than cold reason.  But that had never struck him as of great significance.  Women were like that.  A peculiar obtuseness concealed from him, until now, that men also were much the same.  He was, himself.  When his feelings and his reason came into conflict, it was touch and go which should triumph.  The fact remained that for a long time the war had separated them as effectually as a divorce court.  Hollister had always had a hazy impression that Myra was the sort of woman to whom love was necessary, but he had presumed that it was the love of a particular man, and that man himself.  This, it seemed, was a mistake, and he had paid a penalty for making that mistake.

So he accepted this phase of his unhappiness without too much rancor.  Myra had played fair, he perceived.  She had told him what to expect.  And the accident of a misleading report had permitted her to follow her bent with a moral sanction.  That she had bestowed herself and some forty thousand dollars of his money on another man was not the thing Hollister resented.  He resented only the fact that her glow of love for him had not endured, that it had gone out like an untended fire.  But for some inscrutable reason that had happened.  He had built a dream-house on an unstable foundation.  It had tumbled down.  Very well.  He accepted that.

But he did not accept this unuttered social dictum that he should be kept at arm’s length because he had suffered a ghastly disarrangement of his features while acting as a shield behind which the rest of society rested secure.  No, he would never accept that as a natural fact.  He could not.

No one said that he was a terrible object which should remain in the background along with family skeletons and unmentionable diseases.  He was like poverty and injustice,—­present but ignored.  And this being shunned and avoided, as if he were something which should go about in furtive obscurity, was rapidly driving Hollister to a state approaching desperation.

For he could not rid himself of the social impulse any more than a healthy man can rid himself of the necessity for food and drink at certain intervals.  If Hollister had been so crushed in body and mind that his spirit was utterly quenched, if his vitality had been so drained that he could sit passive and let the world go by unheeded, then he would have been at peace.