The brake of his real manhood
had begun to set upon those wild impulses before he drew up to the
door and looked in the window. What he saw there only cleared with a
brusque hand the cobwebs from his brain.
Fundamentally, Hollister hated trickery, deceit, unfairness,
double-dealing. In his normal state he would neither lie, cheat, nor
steal. He had grown up with a natural tendency to regard his own
ethics as the common attribute of others. There had somehow been born
in him, or had developed as an intrinsic part of his character early
in life, a child-like, trustful quality of faith in human goodness.
And that faith had begun to reel under grievous blows dealt it in the
last four years.
Myra was not worth the taking, even if he had a legal and moral right
to take her (not that he attempted to justify himself now by any such
sophistry). She could not be faithful, it seemed, even to a chosen
lover. The man into whose eyes she gazed with such obvious
complaisance was not the man she lived with in that house on the river
bank. Hollister had watched him through the glasses often enough to
know.
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