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,