Now the mere animal instinct to live was a compelling force within him.  He was young and strong, aching with his desire for life in its fullest sense.  And he did not know how he was going to live and endure the manner of life he had to face, a life that held nothing but frustration and denial of all that was necessary to him, which was making him suffer as acutely as he had ever suffered in the field, under the knives of callous surgeons, in the shambles of the front line or the ether-scented dressing stations.  There is morphine for a tortured body, but there is no opiate for agony of the spirit, the sharp-toothed pain that stabs at a lonely heart with its invisible lancet.

In the darkness of his room, with all the noisy traffic of a seaport city rumbling under his windows, Hollister lay on his bed and struggled against that terrifying depression which had seized him, that spiritual panic.  It was real.  It was based upon undeniable reality.  He was no more captain of his soul than any man born of woman has ever been when he descends into the dark places.  But he knew that he must shake off that feeling, or go mad, or kill himself.  One of the three.  He had known men to kill themselves for less.  He had seen wounded men beg for a weapon to end their pain.  He had known men who, after months of convalescence, quitted by their own hand a life that no longer held anything for them.

And it was not because life held out any promise to Hollister that he lived, nor was it a physical, fear of death, nor any moral scruple against self-destruction.  He clung to life because instinct was stronger than reason, stronger than any of the appalling facts he encountered and knew he must go on encountering.  He had to live, with a past that was no comfort, going on down the pathway of a future which he attempted not to see clearly, because when he did envisage it he was stricken with just such a panic as now overwhelmed him.

To live on and on, a pariah among his fellows because of his disfigurement.  A man with a twisted face, a gargoyle of a countenance.  To have people always shrink from him.  To be denied companionship, friendship, love, to know that so many things which made life beautiful were always just beyond his reach.  To be merely endured.  To have women pity him—­and shun him.

The sweat broke out on Hollister’s face when he thought of all that.  He knew that it was true.  This knowledge had been growing on him for weeks.  To-night the full realization of what it meant engulfed him with terror.  That was all.  He did not cry out against injustice.  He did not whine a protest.  He blamed no one.  He understood, when he looked at himself in the glass.