ighten clients.
He smiled; that rare grimace he permitted himself when alone. Very
likely he would have to accept the commonest sort of labor, in a mill
yard, or on a booming ground, among workers not too sensitive to a
man's appearance.

Staring through the streaming window, Hollister looked down on the
traffic flow in the street, the hurrying figures that braved the storm
in pursuit of pleasure or of necessity, and while that desperate
loneliness gnawed at him, he felt once more a sense of utter defeat,
of hopeless isolation--and for the first time he wished to hide, to
get away out of sight and hearing of men.

It was a fugitive impulse, but it set his mind harking back to the
summer he had spent holidaying along the British Columbia coast long
ago. The tall office buildings, with 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
itself became a rippled arm of the sea, stretching far and silent
between wooded slopes where deer and bear and all the furtive wild
things of the forest went their accustomed way.

Hollister had wandered alone in those hushed places, sleeping with his
face to the stars, and he had not been lonely. He wondered if he could
do that again.

He sat nursing those visions, his imagination pleasantly quickened by
them, as a man sometimes finds ease from care in dreaming 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 far places of the B.C.
coast beckoned with a more imperious gesture, as if in those solitudes
lay a sure refuge for such as he.

And why not, he asked himself? Here in this pushing seaport town,
among the hundred and fifty thousand souls eagerly intent upon their
business of gaining a livelihood, of making money, there was not one
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 in a
cruel variety of ways. The war machine had chewed him up and spat him
out on the scrap heap. None of these hale, unmanned citizens cared to
be annoyed by the sight of him, of what had happened to him.

And he could not much longer endure this unapproachableness, this
palpable shrinking. He could not much longer bear to be in the midst
of light and laugh