But it led him
nowhere except perhaps to a shade of disbelief in Myra and her
motives, a strange instinctive distrust both of her and himself.
He recognized Myra's power. He had succumbed to it in the old careless
days and gloried in his surrender. He perceived that her compelling
charm was still able to move him as it did other men. He knew that
Myra had been carried this way and that in the great, cruel,
indifferent swirl that was life. He could understand a great many
things about her and about himself, about men as men and women as
women, that he would have denied in the days before the war.
But while he could think about himself and Myra Bland with a calmness
that approached indifference, he could not think with that same
detachment about Doris. She had come, walking fearlessly in her
darkened world, to him in his darkened world of discouragement and
bitterness. There was something fine and true in this blind girl,
something that Hollister valued over and above the flesh-and-blood
loveliness of her, something rare and precious that he longed to keep.
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