First he had labored with his hands.  What infinite meaning lay unfolding to her vision!  Somewhere out of it all came the conception that man was intended to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.  But there was more to it than that.  By that toil and sweat, by the friction of horny palms, by the expansion and contraction of muscle, by the acceleration of blood, something great and enduring, something physical and spiritual, came to a man.  She understood then why she would have wanted to surrender herself to a man made manly by toil; she understood how a woman instinctively leaned toward the protection of a man who had used his hands—­who had strength and red blood and virility who could fight like the progenitors of the race.  Any toil was splendid that served this end for any man.  It all went back to the survival of the fittest.  And suddenly Carley thought of Morrison.  He could dance and dangle attendance upon her, and amuse her—­but how would he have acquitted himself in a moment of peril?  She had her doubts.  Most assuredly he could not have beaten down for her a ruffian like Haze Ruff.  What then should be the significance of a man for a woman?

Carley’s querying and answering mind reverted to Glenn.  He had found a secret in this seeking for something through the labor of hands.  All development of body must come through exercise of muscles.  The virility of cell in tissue and bone depended upon that.  Thus he had found in toil the pleasure and reward athletes had in their desultory training.  But when a man learned this secret the need of work must become permanent.  Did this explain the law of the Persians that every man was required to sweat every day?

Carley tried to picture to herself Glenn’s attitude of mind when he had first gone to work here in the West.  Resolutely she now denied her shrinking, cowardly sensitiveness.  She would go to the root of this matter, if she had intelligence enough.  Crippled, ruined in health, wrecked and broken by an inexplicable war, soul-blighted by the heartless, callous neglect of government and public, on the verge of madness at the insupportable facts, he had yet been wonderful enough, true enough to himself and God, to fight for life with the instinct of a man, to fight for his mind with a noble and unquenchable faith.  Alone indeed he had been alone!  And by some miracle beyond the power of understanding he had found day by day in his painful efforts some hope and strength to go on.  He could not have had any illusions.  For Glenn Kilbourne the health and happiness and success most men held so dear must have seemed impossible.  His slow, daily, tragic, and terrible task must have been something he owed himself.  Not for Carley Burch!  She like all the others had failed him.  How Carley shuddered in confession of that!  Not for the country which had used him and cast him off!  Carley divined now, as if by a flash of lightning, the meaning of Glenn’s strange, cold, scornful, and aloof manner