Soldiers' Pay by William Faulkner

Donald Mahon's homecoming, poor fellow, was hardly a nine days' wonder even. Curious, kindly neighbors came in -- men who stood or sat jovially respectable, cheerful: solid business men interested in the war only as a byproduct of the rise and fall of Mr. Wilson, and interested in that only as a matter of dollars and cents, while their wives chatted about clothes to each other across Mahon's scarred, oblivious brow; a few of the rector's more casual acquaintances democratically uncravated, hushing their tobacco into a bulged cheek, diffidently but firmly refusing to surrender their hats; girls that he had known, had danced with or courted of summer nights, come now to look once upon his face, and then quickly aside in hushed nausea, not coming any more unless his face happened to be hidden on the first visit (upon which they finally found opportunity to see it); boys come to go away fretted because he wouldn't tell any war stories -- all this going on about him while Gilligan, his glum majordomo, handled them all with impartial discouraging efficiency.

"Beat it, now," he repeated to young Robert Saunders, who with sundry contemporaries to whom he had promised something good in the way of damaged soldiers, had called.