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Page 67
Either the world was all wrong or the people in it were. But if that were
an extravagant and erroneous supposition, there certainly was proof
positive that her own small individual world was wrong. The women did not
do any real work; they did not bear children; they lived on excitement and
luxury. They had no ideals. How greatly were men to blame? Carley doubted
her judgment here. But as men could not live without the smiles and
comradeship and love of women, it was only natural that they should give
the women what they wanted. Indeed, they had no choice. It was give or go
without. How much of real love entered into the marriages among her
acquaintances? Before marriage Carley wanted a girl to be sweet, proud,
aloof, with a heart of golden fire. Not attainable except through love! It
would be better that no children be born at all unless born of such
beautiful love. Perhaps that was why so few children were born. Nature's
balance and revenge! In Arizona Carley had learned something of the
ruthlessness and inevitableness of nature. She was finding out she had
learned this with many other staggering facts.
"I love Glenn still," she whispered, passionately, with trembling lips, as
she faced the tragic-eyed image of herself in the mirror. "I love him more--
more. Oh, my God! If I were honest I'd cry out the truth! It is terrible.
. . . I will always love him. How then could I marry any other man? I would
be a lie, a cheat. If I could only forget him--only kill that love. Then I
might love another man--and if I did love him--no matter what I had felt or
done before, I would be worthy. I could feel worthy. I could give him just
as much. But without such love I'd give only a husk--a body without soul."
Love, then, was the sacred and holy flame of life that sanctioned the
begetting of children. Marriage might be a necessity of modern time, but it
was not the vital issue. Carley's anguish revealed strange and hidden
truths. In some inexplicable way Nature struck a terrible balance--revenged
herself upon a people who had no children, or who brought into the world
children not created by the divinity of love, unyearned for, and therefore
somehow doomed to carry on the blunders and burdens of life.
Carley realized how right and true it might be for her to throw herself
away upon an inferior man, even a fool or a knave, if she loved him with
that great and natural love of woman; likewise it dawned upon her how false
and wrong and sinful it would be to marry the greatest or the richest or
the noblest man unless she had that supreme love to give him, and knew it
was reciprocated.
"What am I going to do with my life?" she asked, bitterly and aghast. "I
have been--I am a waster. I've lived for nothing but pleasurable sensation.
I'm utterly useless. I do absolutely no good on earth."
Thus she saw how Harrington's words rang true--how they had precipitated a
crisis for which her unconscious brooding had long made preparation.
"Why not give up ideals and be like the rest of my kind?" she soliloquized.
That was one of the things which seemed wrong with modern life. She thrust
the thought from her with passionate scorn. If poor, broken, ruined Glenn
Kilbourne could cling to an ideal and fight for it, could not she, who had
all the world esteemed worth while, be woman enough to do the same? The
direction of her thought seemed to have changed. She had been ready for
rebellion. Three months of the old life had shown her that for her it was
empty, vain, farcical, without one redeeming feature. The naked truth was
brutal, but it cut clean to wholesome consciousness. Such so-called social
life as she had plunged into deliberately to forget her unhappiness had
failed her utterly. If she had been shallow and frivolous it might have
done otherwise. Stripped of all guise, her actions must have been construed
by a penetrating and impartial judge as a mere parading of her decorated
person before a number of males with the purpose of ultimate selection.
"I've got to find some work," she muttered, soberly.
At the moment she heard the postman's whistle outside; and a little later
the servant brought up her mail. The first letter, large, soiled, thick,
bore the postmark Flagstaff, and her address in Glenn Kilbourne's writing.
Carley stared at it. Her heart gave a great leap. Her hand shook. She sat
down suddenly as if the strength of her legs was inadequate to uphold her.
"Glenn has--written me!" she whispered, in slow, halting realization. "For
what? Oh, why?"
The other letters fell off her lap, to lie unnoticed. This big thick
envelope fascinated her. It was one of the stamped envelopes she had seen
in his cabin. It contained a letter that had been written on his rude
table, before the open fire, in the light of the doorway, in that little
log-cabin under the spreading pines of West Ford Canyon. Dared she read it?
The shock to her heart passed; and with mounting swell, seemingly too full
for her breast, it began to beat and throb a wild gladness through all her
being. She tore the envelope apart and read:
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