He beheld himself upon the streets of London, one of innumerable stray dogs, ruined, deserted, disfigured, a bit of war’s wreckage.  He did not particularly consider himself a victim of injustice.  He did not blame Myra.  He was simply numbed and bewildered.

But that was before he grew conscious of what it meant to a sensitive man, a man in whom all warm human impulses flowed so strongly, to be penniless, to have all the dependable foundations of his life torn from under his feet, to be so disfigured that people shunned him.

He had to gather up the broken pieces of his life, fit them together, go on as best he could.  It did not occur to him at first to do otherwise, or that the doing would be hard.  He had not foreseen all the strange shifts he would be put to, the humiliations he would suffer, the crushing weight of hopelessness which gathered upon him by the time he arrived on the Pacific Coast, where he had once lived, to which he now turned to do as men all over the war-racked earth were doing in the winter of 1919,—­cast about in an effort to adjust himself, to make a place for himself in civil life.

All the way across the continent of North America Hollister grew more and more restive under the accumulating knowledge that the horrible devastation of his features made a No Man’s Land about him which few had the courage to cross.  It was a fact.  Here, upon the evening of the third day in Vancouver, a blind and indescribable fear seized upon him, a sickening conviction that although living, he was dead,—­dead in so far as the common, casual intimacies of daily intercourse with his fellows went.  It was as if men and women were universally repulsed by that grotesquely distorted mask which served him for a face, as if at sight of it by common impulse they made off, withdrew to a safe distance, as they would withdraw from any loathsome thing.

Lying on his bed, Hollister flexed his arms.  He arched his chest and fingered the muscular breadth of it in the darkness.  Bodily, he was a perfect man.  Strength flowed through him in continuous waves.  He could feel within himself the surge of vast stores of energy.  His brain functioned with a bright, bitter clearness.  He could feel,—­ah, that was the hell of it.  That quivering response to the subtle nuances of thought!  A profound change had come upon him, yet essentially he, the man, was unchanged.  Except for those scars, the convoluted ridges of tissue, the livid patches and the ghastly hollows where once his cheeks and lips and forehead had been smooth and regular, he was as he had always been.

For a moment there came over him the wild impulse to rush out into the street, crying: 

“You fools!  Because my face is torn and twisted makes me no different from you.  I still feel and think.  I am as able to love and hate as you.  Was all your talk about honorable scars just prattle to mislead the men who risked the scars?  Is all your much advertised kindliness and sympathy for war-broken men a bluff?”