His own people? They were few and far away.
His friends? The war had ripped everything loose, broken the old
combinations, scattered the groups. There was, for Hollister, nothing
left of the old days. And he himself was dead,--officially dead.
After all, it narrowed to himself and Doris Cleveland and an ethical
question.
He did not shut his eyes to the fact that for him this marriage would
be bigamy; that their children would be illegitimate in the eyes of
the law if legal scrutiny ever laid bare their father's history; nor
that by all the accepted dictums of current morality he would be
leading an innocent woman into sin. But current morality had ceased to
have its old significance for Hollister. He had seen too much of it
vaporized so readily in the furnace of the war. Convention had lost
any power to dismay him. His world had used him in its hour of need,
had flung him into the Pit, and when he crawled out maimed,
discouraged, stripped of everything that had made life precious, this
world of his fellows shunned him because of what he had suffered in
their behalf.
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