All his life Hollister had been able to command money without effort.  Until he came back from the war he did not know what it meant to be poor.  He had known business as a process in which a man used money to make more money.  He had been accustomed to buy and sell, to deal with tokens rather than with things themselves.  Now he found himself at the primitive source of things and he learned, a little to his astonishment, the pride of definitely planned creative work.  He began to understand that lesson which many men never learn, the pleasure of pure achievement even in simple things.

For two or three days he occupied himself at various tasks on the flat.  He did this to keep watch over Doris, to see that she did not come to grief in this unfamiliar territory.  But he soon put aside those first misgivings, as he was learning to put aside any fear of the present or of the future, which arose from her blindness.  His love for her had not been borne of pity.  He had never thought of her as helpless.  She was too vivid, too passionately alive in body and mind to inspire him with that curiously mixed feeling which the strong bestow upon the maimed and the weak.  But there were certain risks of which he was conscious, no matter that Doris laughingly disclaimed them.  With a stick and her ears and fingers she could go anywhere, she said; and she was not far wrong, as Hollister knew.

Within forty-eight hours she had the run of the house and the cleared portion of land surrounding.  She could put her hand on every item of her kitchen equipment.  She could get kindling out of the wood box; light a fire in the stove as well as he.  All the stock of food staples lay in an orderly arrangement of her own choice on the kitchen shelves.  She knew every object in the two rooms, each chair and box and stool, the step at the front door, the short path to the river bank, the trunk of the branchy maple, the rugged bark of a great spruce behind the house, as if within her brain there existed an exact diagram of the whole and with which as a guide she could move within those limits as swiftly and surely as Hollister himself.

He never ceased to wonder at the mysterious delicacies of touch and hearing which served her so well in place of sight.  But he accepted the fact, and once she had mastered her surroundings Hollister was free to take up his own work, no matter where it led him.  Doris insisted that he should.  She had a sturdy soul that seldom leaned and never thought of clinging.  She could laugh, a deep-throated chuckling laugh, and sometimes, quite unexpectedly, she could go about the house singing.  And if now and then she rebelled with a sudden, furious resentment against the long night that shut her in, that, as she said herself, was just like a small black cloud passing swiftly across the face of the sun.