ne 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," sh