untry. How Carley clasped to her sore
heart the praise of the man she loved--the simple proofs of his noble
disregard of self! Rust said little about his own service to country or
to comrade. But Carley saw enough in his face. He had been like Glenn.
By these two Carley grasped the compelling truth of the spirit and
sacrifice of the legion of boys who had upheld American traditions.
Their children and their children's children, as the years rolled by
into the future, would hold their heads higher and prouder. Some things
could never die in the hearts and the blood of a race. These boys, and
the girls who had the supreme glory of being loved by them, must be
the ones to revive the Americanism of their forefathers. Nature and God
would take care of the slackers, the cowards who cloaked their shame
with bland excuses of home service, of disability, and of dependence.

Carley saw two forces in life--the destructive and constructive. On
the one side greed, selfishness, materialism: on the other generosity,
sacrifice, and idealism. Which of them builded for the future? She saw
men as wolves, sharks, snakes, vermin, and opposed to them men as lions
and eagles. She saw women who did not inspire men to fare forth to seek,
to imagine, to dream, to hope, to work, to fight. She began to have a
glimmering of what a woman might be.

That night she wrote swiftly and feverishly, page after page, to Glenn,
only to destroy what she had written. She could not keep her heart out
of her words, nor a hint of what was becoming a sleepless and eternal
regret. She wrote until a late hour, and at last composed a letter she
knew did not ring true, so stilted and restrained was it in all passages
save those concerning news of Glenn's comrade and of her own friends.
"I'll never--never write him again," she averred with stiff lips, and
next moment could have laughed in mockery at the bitter truth. If she
had ever had any courage, Glenn's letter had destroyed it. But had it
not been a kind of selfish, false courage, roused to hide her hurt, to
save her own future? Courage should have a thought of others. Yet shamed
one moment at the consciousness she would write Glenn again and again,
and exultant the next with the clamouring love, she seemed to have
climbed beyond the self that had striven to forget. She would remember
and think though she died of longing.

Carley, like a drowning woman, caught at straws. What a relief and joy
to give up that en