children would be illegitimate before the law.

Hollister's morality was the morality of his early environment; his
class was that magnificently inert middle class which sets its face
rigorously against change, which proceeds naively upon the assumption
that everything has always been as it is and will continue to be so;
that the man and woman who deviates from the accepted conventions in
living, loving, marrying, breeding--even in dying--does so because of
innate depravity, and that such people must be damned by bell, book
and candle in this world, as they shall assuredly be damned in the
next.

Hollister could no longer believe that goodness and badness were
wholly matters of free will. From the time he put on the king's
uniform in a spirit of idealistic service down to the day he met Doris
Cleveland on the steamer, his experience had been a succession of
devastating incidents. What had happened to him had happened to
others. Life laid violent hands on them and tossed them about like
frail craft on a windy sea. The individual was caught in the vortex of
the social whirlpool, and what he did, what he thought and felt, what
he became, was colored and conditioned by a multitude of circumstances
that flowed about him as irresistibly as an ocean tide.

Hollister no longer had a philosophy of life in which motives and
actions were tagged and labeled according to their kind. He had lost
his old confidence in certain arbitrary moral dicta which are the
special refuge of those whose intelligence is keen enough to grapple
competently with any material problem but who stand aghast,
apprehensive and uncomprehending, before a spiritual struggle, before
the wavering gusts of human passion.

If he judged himself by his own earlier standard he was damned, and he
had dragged Doris Cleveland down with him. So was Myra smeared with
the pitch of moral obloquy. They were sinners all. Pain should be
their desert; shame and sorrow their portion.

Why? Because driven by the need within them, blinded by the dust of
circumstance and groping for security amid the vast confusion which
had overtaken them, they reached out and grasped such semblence of
happiness as came within reach of their uncertain hands.

The world at large, Hollister was aware, would be decisively
intolerant of them all, if the world should by chance be called to
pass judgment.

But he himself could no more pass harsh judgment upon his former wife
than he could feel