He made a
deliberate effort to reason about it, and though his reason assumed
that when a woman like Doris Cleveland loved a man she did not love
him for the unblemished contours of his face, there was still that
deep-rooted, unreasoning feeling that however she might love him as
the unseen, the ideal lover, she must inevitably shrink from the
reality.
He stood still for a few seconds. In the living quarters of his house
there was, by deliberate intention, no mirror. Among Hollister's
things there was a small hand glass before which he shaved off the
hairs that grew out of the few patches of unscarred flesh about his
chin, those fragments of his beard which sprouted in grotesquely
separated tufts. But in the bedroom they had arranged for the
housekeeper there was a large oval glass above a dresser. Into this
room Hollister now walked and stood before the mirror staring at his
face.
No, he could not blame her, any one, for shrinking from _that_. And
when the darting shuttle of his thought reminded him that Myra did not
shrink from it, he went out to the front room and with his body sunk
deep in a leather chair he fell to pondering on this.
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