“No trouble, I assure you,” Lewis hastened to assent, but his tone lacked heartiness, sincerity.

It was only a little distance to the bank, but Lewis insisted on making the journey in a motorcar which stood at the curb.  It was plain to Hollister that Mr. Lewis disliked the necessity of appearing in public with him, that he took this means of avoiding the crowded sidewalks, of meeting people.  He introduced Hollister, excused himself on the plea of business pressure, and left Hollister standing before the teller’s wicket.

This was not a new attitude to Hollister.  People did that,—­as if he were a plague.  There came into his mind—­as he stood counting the sheaf of notes slide through a grill by a teller who looked at him once and thereafter kept his eyes averted—­a paraphrase of a hoary quotation, “I am a monster of such frightful mien, as to be hated needs but to be seen.”  The rest of it, Hollister thought grimly, could never apply to him.

He put the money in his pocket and walked out on the street.  It was a 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 nothing—­absolutely nothing—­apart from some form of social grouping.  And society, which had exacted so much from him, seemed peculiarly indifferent to the consequences of those imperative exactions, seemed wholly indifferent to his vital need.