She went to the theater a good deal, showing preference for the drama of strife, and she did not go anywhere for amusement.  Distraction and amusement seemed to be dead issues for her.  But she could become absorbed in any argument on the good or evil of the present day.  Socialism reached into her mind, to be rejected.  She had never understood it clearly, but it seemed to her a state of mind where dissatisfied men and women wanted to share what harder working or more gifted people possessed.  There were a few who had too much of the world’s goods and many who had too little.  A readjustment of such inequality and injustice must come, but Carley did not see the remedy in Socialism.

She devoured books on the war with a morbid curiosity and hope that she 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.