The new year had not been many minutes old when Glenn Kilbourne had told her he was going West to try to recover his health.

Carley roused out of her memories to take up the letter that had so perplexed her.  It bore the postmark, Flagstaff, Arizona.  She reread it with slow pondering thoughtfulness.

West fork,
March 25.

Dear Carley: 

It does seem my neglect in writing you is unpardonable.  I used to be a pretty fair correspondent, but in that as in other things I have changed.

One reason I have not answered sooner is because your letter was so sweet and loving that it made me feel an ungrateful and unappreciative wretch.  Another is that this life I now lead does not induce writing.  I am outdoors all day, and when I get back to this cabin at night I am too tired for anything but bed.

Your imperious questions I must answer—­and that must, of course, is a third reason why I have delayed my reply.  First, you ask, “Don’t you love me any more as you used to?” . . .  Frankly, I do not.  I am sure my old love for you, before I went to France, was selfish, thoughtless, sentimental, and boyish.  I am a man now.  And my love for you is different.  Let me assure you that it has been about all left to me of what is noble and beautiful.  Whatever the changes in me for the worse, my love for you, at least, has grown better, finer, purer.

And now for your second question, “Are you coming home as soon as you are well again?” . . .  Carley, I am well.  I have delayed telling you this because I knew you would expect me to rush back East with the telling.  But—­ the fact is, Carley, I am not coming—­just yet.  I wish it were possible for me to make you understand.  For a long time I seem to have been frozen within.  You know when I came back from France I couldn’t talk.  It’s almost as bad as that now.  Yet all that I was then seems to have changed again.  It is only fair to you to tell you that, as I feel now, I hate the city, I hate people, and particularly I hate that dancing, drinking, lounging set you chase with.  I don’t want to come East until I am over that, you know. . .  Suppose I never get over it?  Well, Carley, you can free yourself from me by one word that I could never utter.  I could never break our engagement.  During the hell I went through in the war my attachment to you saved me from moral ruin, if it did not from perfect honor and fidelity.  This is another thing I despair of making you understand.  And in the chaos I’ve wandered through since the war my love for you was my only anchor.  You never guessed, did you, that I lived on your letters until I got well.  And now the fact that I might get along without them is no discredit to their charm or to you.

It is all so hard to put in words, Carley.  To lie down with death and get up with death was nothing.  To face one’s degradation was nothing.  But to come home an incomprehensibly changed man—­and to see my old life as strange as if it were the new life of another planet—­to try to slip into the old groove—­well, no words of mine can tell you how utterly impossible it was.