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.
And it was not reward or recognition of service performed that
Hollister craved. He did not want to be pensioned or subsidized or to
have medals pinned on him. What he wanted was chiefly to forget the
war and what the war had visited upon him and others like him.
Hollister suffered solely from that sense of being held outside the
warm circle of human activities, fellowships, friendliness. If he
could not overcome that barrier which people threw up around
themselves at contact with him, if he could not occasionally know the
sound of a friendly voice, he felt that he would very soon go mad. A
man cannot go on forever enduring the pressure of the intolerable.
Hollister felt that he must soon arrive at a crisis. What form it
would take he did not know, and in certain moods he did not care.
On the landing at the end of the narrow corridor off which his room
opened he met a man in uniform whom he recognized,--a young man who
had served under him in the Forty-fourth, who had won a commission on
the field.
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