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 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.