I'll be able to climb
hills and paddle a canoe, to go with you wherever you want to take me.
Won't it be splendid? I've only been half a woman. I have wondered
sometimes how long it would be before you grew weary of my moods and
my helplessness."
And Hollister could only pat her cheek and tell her that he loved her,
that her eyes made no difference. He could not voice the fear he had
that her recovered sight would make the greatest difference, that the
reality of him, the distorted visage which peered at him from a mirror
would make her loathe him. He was not a fool. He knew that people, the
women especially, shrank from the crippled, the disfigured, the
malformed, the horrible. That had been his experience. It had very
nearly driven him mad. He had no illusions about the men who worked
for him, about his neighbors. They found him endurable, and that was
about all. If Doris Cleveland had seen him clearly that day on the
steamer, if she had been able to critically survey the unlovely thing
that war had made of him, she might have pitied him.
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