, 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
furti