The Hidden Places

n the evening. He laid his cap and gloves on the bed, seated himself, swung h

ople in Vancouver. All sorts of fetching affairs on the tapis. And I'm to be demobilized myself nex

eflections for a minute, blowing

w could make it go i

r made n

marked, with an abrupt change of tone. "I'm going to a hop at the Grana

an inquiring re

ing?" he asked lig

much," Hollis

rford observed sagely. "You ought to k

glitters and becomes joyful, eh? No, I don't fanc

. "It isn't so bad as that. Cheer up, o

" Holliste

Rutherford, frankly mystified and somewhat inclined

was a profound, non-thinking egotist, the adventurer pure and simple, whose mentality never rose above grossness of one sort and another, in spite of a certain outward polish. He could tolerate Hollister's mutilated countenance because he had grown accustomed to horrible sights,-not because he had any particular sympathy for a crippled, mutilated man's mi

ening area shot with tiny streams and shallow puddles that were splashed over the curb by rolling motor wheels. The wind droned its ancient, melancholy chant among the telephone wires, shook with its unseen, powerful hands a row of bare maples across the way, rattled the windows

thrown too largely on her own resources in an environment so strongly tinctured by the high-pitched and reckless spirit generated by the war. He had always known that his wife-women generally were the same, he supposed-was dominated by emotional urges, rather than cold reason. But that had never struck him as of great significance. Women were like that. A peculiar obtuseness concealed from him, until now, that men also were much the same. He was, himself. Wh

ent with a moral sanction. That she had bestowed herself and some forty thousand dollars of his money on another man was not the thing Hollister resented. He resented only the fact that her glow of love for him h

he had suffered a ghastly disarrangement of his features while acting as a shield behind which t

nable diseases. He was like poverty and injustice,-present but ignored. And this being shunned and avoided, as if he wer

d drink at certain intervals. If Hollister had been so crushed in body and mind that his spirit was utterly quenched, if hi

to sit in the sun, to be fed and let alone. T

passions, his strength. He could not be passive either physically or mentally. His mind was too alert, his spirit too sen

ion could not be more complete. It was as if the sight of him affected men and women with a sense of something unnatural, monstrous. He sweated under this. But he was alive, and life was a reality to him, the will to live a do

hat harassed him with disheartening insistence as he watched through his windo

g," he said to himself. "If I s

rately he strove to turn his thought out of the depressing channels i

to bottom. But he could not see himself behind a desk, directing or selling. His face would frighten clients. He smiled; that rare grimace he permitted himself when

d the storm in pursuit of pleasure or of necessity, and while that desperate loneliness gnawed at him, he felt once more a sen

yellow window squares dotting the black walls, became the sun-bathed hills looking loftily down on rivers and bays and inlets that he knew. The wet floor of the street itsel

sleeping with his face to the stars, and he had not

of old days that were full of gladness. He was still deep in the past when he went to bed. And when he arose in the morning, the

who cared whether he came or went, whether he was glad or sad, whether he had a song on his lips or the blackest gloom in his heart. He had done his bit as a man should. In the doing he had been broken

hut off from any part in it all. He was in as evil case as a man chained to a rock and dying of thirst, while a clear, cold stream flowed at his feet. Whether he walked the streets or sat brooding in his room,

should save him from being purely aimless. In the end it came into his mind that he might go back and look over this timber in the valley of the Toba River, this last vestige of his fortune which remained to him by pure chance. He had bought it as an investment for surplus funds. He had neve

ew weeks he would be alone in the woods, where men would not eye him