busy corner on a humming thoroughfare. Electric cars rumbled and
creaked one behind another on the double tracks. Waves of vehicular
traffic rolled by the curb. A current of humanity flowed past him on
the sidewalk.

Standing there for a minute, Hollister felt again the slow rising of
his resentment against these careless, fortunate ones. He could not
say what caused that feeling. A look, a glance,--the inevitable
shrinking. He was morbidly sensitive. He knew that, knew it was a
state of mind that was growing upon him. But from whatever cause, that
feeling of intolerable isolation gave way to an inner fury.

As he stood there, he felt a wild desire to shout at these people, to
curse them, to seize one of these dainty women by the arms, thrust his
disfigured face close to hers and cry: "Look at me as if I were a man,
not a monstrosity. I'm what I am so that you could be what you are.
Look at me, damn you!"

He pulled himself together and walked on. Certainly he would soon run
amuck if he did not get over feeling like that, if he did not master
these impulses which bordered on insanity. He wondered if that inner
ferment would drive him insane.

He went back to the second-rate hotel where he had taken refuge,
depressed beyond words, afraid of himself, afraid of the life which
lay in fragments behind him and spread away before him in terrifying
drabness. Yet he must go on living. To live was the dominant instinct.
A man did not put on or off the desire to live as he put on or off his
coat. But life promised nothing. It was going to be a sorry affair. It
struck Hollister with disheartening force that an individual is