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Page 66
CHAPTER IX
The latter part of September Carley returned to New York.
Soon after her arrival she received by letter a formal proposal of marriage
from Elbert Harrington, who had been quietly attentive to her during her
sojourn at Lake Placid. He was a lawyer of distinction, somewhat older than
most of her friends, and a man of means and fine family. Carley was quite
surprised. Harrington was really one of the few of her acquaintances whom
she regarded as somewhat behind the times, and liked him the better for
that. But she could not marry him, and replied to his letter in as kindly a
manner as possible. Then he called personally.
"Carley, I've come to ask you to reconsider," he said, with a smile in his
gray eyes. He was not a tall or handsome man, but he had what women called
a nice strong face.
"Elbert, you embarrass me," she replied, trying to laugh it out. "Indeed I
feel honored, and I thank you. But I can't marry you."
"Why not?" he asked, quietly.
"Because I don't love you," she replied.
"I did not expect you to," he said. "I hoped in time you might come to
care. I've known you a good many years, Carley. Forgive me if I tell you I
see you are breaking--wearing yourself down. Maybe it is not a husband you
need so much now, but you do need a home and children. You are wasting your
life."
"All you say may be true, my friend," replied Carley, with a helpless
little upflinging of hands. "Yet it does not alter my feelings."
"But you will marry sooner or later?" he queried, persistently.
This straightforward question struck Carley as singularly as if it was one
she might never have encountered. It forced her to think of things she had
buried.
"I don't believe I ever will," she answered, thoughtfully.
"That is nonsense, Carley," he went on. "You'll have to marry. What else
can you do? With all due respect to your feelings--that affair with
Kilbourne is ended--and you're not the wishy-washy heartbreak kind of a
girl."
"You can never tell what a woman will do," she said, somewhat coldly.
"Certainly not. That's why I refuse to take no. Carley, be reasonable. You
like me--respect me, do you not?"
"Why, of course I do!"
"I'm only thirty-five, and I could give you all any sensible woman wants,"
he said. "Let's make a real American home. Have you thought at all about
that, Carley? Something is wrong today. Men are not marrying. Wives are not
having children. Of all the friends I have, not one has a real American
home. Why, it is a terrible fact! But, Carley, you are not a
sentimentalist, or a melancholiac. Nor are you a waster. You have fine
qualities. You need something to do, some one to care for."
"Pray do not think me ungrateful, Elbert," she replied, "nor insensible to
the truth of what you say. But my answer is no!"
When Harrington had gone Carley went to her room, and precisely as upon her
return from Arizona she faced her mirror skeptically and relentlessly. "I
am such a liar that I'll do well to look at myself," she meditated. "Here I
am again. Now! The world expects me to marry. But what do I expect?"
There was a raw unheated wound in Carley's heart. Seldom had she permitted
herself to think about it, let alone to probe it with hard materialistic
queries. But custom to her was as inexorable as life. If she chose to live
in the world she must conform to its customs. For a woman marriage was the
aim and the end and the all of existence. Nevertheless, for Carley it could
not be without love. Before she had gone West she might have had many of
the conventional modern ideas about women and marriage. But because out
there in the wilds her love and perception had broadened, now her
arraignment of herself and her sex was bigger, sterner, more exacting. The
months she had been home seemed fuller than all the months of her life. She
had tried to forget and enjoy; she had not succeeded; but she had looked
with far-seeing eyes at her world. Glenn Kilbourne's tragic fate had opened
her eyes.
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