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 endless nagging at her mind! For months she had kept
ceaselessly active, by associations which were of no help to her and
which did not make her happy, in her determination to forget. Suddenly
then she gave up to remembrance. She would cease trying to get over her
love for Glenn, and think of him and dream about him as much as memory
dictated. This must constitute the only happiness she could have.
The change from strife to surrender was so novel and sweet that for
days she felt renewed. It was augmented by her visits to the hospital
in Bedford Park. Through her bountiful presence Virgil Rust and his
comrades had many dull hours of pain and weariness alleviated and
brightened. Interesting herself in the condition of the seriously
disabled soldiers and possibility of their future took time and work
Carley gave willingly and gladly. At first she endeavored to get
acquaintances with means and leisure to help the boys, but these
overtures met with such little success that she quit wasting valuable
time she could herself devote to their interests.