Vigorously he dissented from Lawanne's philosophy of enslavement. He,
Hollister, was a free man. Yes, he was free,--but only when he could
shut the door on the past, only when he could shut away all the world
just as he had but now shut out the valley, the cold frosty night, his
neighbors and his men, by the simple closing of a door. But he could
not shut away the consciousness that they were there, that he must
meet Myra and her vague questioning, Mills with his strange
repression, his brooding air. He must see them again, be perplexed by
them, perhaps find his own life, his own happiness, tangled in the web
of their affairs. Hollister could frown over that unwelcome
possibility. He could say to himself that it was only an impression;
that he was a fool to labor under that sense of insecurity. But he
could not help it. Life was like that. No man stood alone. No man
could ever completely achieve mastery of his relations to his
fellows. Until life became extinct, men and women would be swayed and
conditioned by blind human forces, governed by relations casual or
intimate, imposed upon them by the very law of their being.
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