e
would find some illuminating truth as to the uselessness of sacrificing
young men in the glory and prime of their lives. To her war appeared a
matter of human nature rather than politics. Hate really was an effect
of war. In her judgment future wars could be avoided only in two
ways--by men becoming honest and just or by women refusing to have
children to be sacrificed. As there seemed no indication whatever of
the former, she wondered how soon all women of all races would meet on
a common height, with the mounting spirit that consumed her own heart.
Such time must come. She granted every argument for war and flung
against it one ringing passionate truth--agony of mangled soldiers and
agony of women and children. There was no justification for offensive
war. It was monstrous and hideous. If nature and evolution proved the
absolute need of strife, war, blood, and death in the progress of animal
and man toward perfection, then it would be better to abandon this
Christless code and let the race of man die out.

All through these weeks she longed for a letter from Glenn. But it did
not come. Had he finally roused to the sweetness and worth and love
of the western girl, Flo Hutter? Carley knew absolutely, through both
intelligence and intuition, that Glenn Kilbourne would never love
Flo. Yet such was her intensity and stress at times, especially in the
darkness of waking hours, that jealousy overcame her and insidiously
worked its havoc. Peace and a strange kind of joy came to her in dreams
of her walks and rides and climbs in Arizona, of the lonely canyon where
it always seemed afternoon, of the tremendous colored vastness of that
Painted Desert. But she resisted these dreams now because when she awoke
from them she suffered such a yearning that it became unbearable. Then
she knew the feeling of the loneliness and solitude of the hills. Then
she knew the sweetness of the murmur of falling water, the wind in the
pines, the song of birds, the white radiance of the stars, the break
of day and its gold-flushed close. But she had not yet divined their
meaning. It was not all love for Glenn Kilbourne. Had city life palled
upon her solely because of the absence of her lover? So Carley plodded
on, like one groping in the night, fighting shadows.

One day she received a card from an old schoolmate, a girl who had
married out of Carley's set, and had been ostracized. She was living
down on Long Island, at a little country place na