What would she think, if she knew, this dainty
creature cuddling against his knee? He would wake in the night and lie
on elbow staring at her face in the moonlight,--delicate-skinned as a
child's, that lovable, red-lipped mouth, those dear, blind eyes which
sometimes gave him the illusion of seeing clearly out of their gray
depths.
What would she think? What would she, say? What would she do? He did
not know. It troubled him to think of this. If he could have swept
Myra out of North America with a wave of his hand, he would have made
one sweeping gesture. He was jealous of his happiness, his security,
and Myra's presence was not only a reminder; it had the effect upon
him of a threat he could not ignore.
Yet he was compelled to ignore it. She and Doris had become fast
friends. It all puzzled Hollister very much sometimes. Except for the
uprooting, the undermining influences of his war experience, he would
have been revolted at his own actions. He had committed technical
bigamy. His children would be illegitimate before the law.
Hollister's morality was the morality of his early environment; his
class was that magnificently inert middle class which sets its face
rigorously against change, which proceeds naively upon the assumption
that everything has always been as it is and will continue to be so;
that the man and woman who deviates from the accepted conventions in
living, loving, marrying, breeding--even in dying--does so because of
innate depravity, and that such people must be damned by bell, book
and candle in this world, as they shall assuredly be damned in the
next.
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