Carley dismounted from her panting horse, answering the familiar impulse to attain heights by her own effort.

“Am I only a weakling?” she asked herself.  “Only a creature mined by the fever of the soul! . . .  Thrown from one emotion to another?  Never the same.  Yearning, suffering, sacrificing, hoping, and changing—­forever the same!  What is it that drives me?  A great city with all its attractions has failed to help me realize my life.  So have friends failed.  So has the world.  What can solitude and grandeur do? . . .  All this obsession of mine—­all this strange feeling for simple elemental earthly things likewise will fail me.  Yet I am driven.  They would call me a mad woman.”

It took Carley a full hour of slow body-bending labor to climb to the summit of that hill.  High, steep, and rugged, it resisted ascension.  But at last she surmounted it and sat alone on the heights, with naked eyes, and an unconscious prayer on her lips.

What was it that had happened?  Could there be here a different answer from that which always mocked her?

She had been a girl, not accountable for loss of mother, for choice of home and education.  She had belonged to a class.  She had grown to womanhood in it.  She had loved, and in loving had escaped the evil of her day, if not its taint.  She had lived only for herself.  Conscience had awakened—­but, alas! too late.  She had overthrown the sordid, self-seeking habit of life; she had awakened to real womanhood; she had fought the insidious spell of modernity and she had defeated it; she had learned the thrill of taking root in new soil, the pain and joy of labor, the bliss of solitude, the promise of home and love and motherhood.  But she had gathered all these marvelous things to her soul too late for happiness.

“Now it is answered,” she declared aloud.  “That is what has happened? . . .  And all that is past. . . .  Is there anything left?  If so what?”

She flung her query out to the winds of the desert.  But the desert seemed too gray, too vast, too remote, too aloof, too measureless.  It was not concerned with her little life.  Then she turned to the mountain kingdom.

It seemed overpoweringly near at hand.  It loomed above her to pierce the fleecy clouds.  It was only a stupendous upheaval of earth-crust, grown over at the base by leagues and leagues of pine forest, belted along the middle by vast slanting zigzag slopes of aspen, rent and riven toward the heights into canyon and gorge, bared above to cliffs and corners of craggy rock, whitened at the sky-piercing peaks by snow.  Its beauty and sublimity were lost upon Carley now; she was concerned with its travail, its age, its endurance, its strength.  And she studied it with magnified sight.

What incomprehensible subterranean force had swelled those immense slopes and lifted the huge bulk aloft to the clouds?  Cataclysm of nature—­the expanding or shrinking of the earth—­vast volcanic action under the surface!  Whatever it had been, it had left its expression of the travail of the universe.  This mountain mass had been hot gas when flung from the parent sun, and now it was solid granite.  What had it endured in the making?  What indeed had been its dimensions before the millions of years of its struggle?