Then they entered a taxi, to be whisked away apparently through a labyrinthine maze of cars and streets, where pedestrians had to run and jump for their lives.  A congestion of traffic at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street halted their taxi for a few moments, and here in the thick of it Carley had full assurance that she was back in the metropolis.  Her sore heart eased somewhat at sight of the streams of people passing to and fro.  How they rushed!  Where were they going?  What was their story?  And all the while her aunt held her hand, and Beatrice and Eleanor talked as fast as their tongues could wag.  Then the taxi clattered on up the Avenue, to turn down a side street and presently stop at Carley’s home.  It was a modest three-story brown-stone house.  Carley had been so benumbed by sensations that she did not imagine she could experience a new one.  But peering out of the taxi, she gazed dubiously at the brownish-red stone steps and front of her home.

“I’m going to have it painted,” she muttered, as if to herself.

Her aunt and her friends laughed, glad and relieved to hear such a practical remark from Carley.  How were they to divine that this brownish-red stone was the color of desert rocks and canyon walls?

In a few more moments Carley was inside the house, feeling a sense of protection in the familiar rooms that had been her home for seventeen years.  Once in the sanctity of her room, which was exactly as she had left it, her first action was to look in the mirror at her weary, dusty, heated face.  Neither the brownness of it nor the shadow appeared to harmonize with the image of her that haunted the mirror.

“Now!” she whispered low.  “It’s done.  I’m home.  The old life—­or a new life?  How to meet either.  Now!”

Thus she challenged her spirit.  And her intelligence rang at her the imperative necessity for action, for excitement, for effort that left no time for rest or memory or wakefulness.  She accepted the issue.  She was glad of the stern fight ahead of her.  She set her will and steeled her heart with all the pride and vanity and fury of a woman who had been defeated but who scorned defeat.  She was what birth and breeding and circumstance had made her.  She would seek what the old life held.

What with unpacking and chatting and telephoning and lunching, the day soon passed.  Carley went to dinner with friends and later to a roof garden.  The color and light, the gayety and music, the news of acquaintances, the humor of the actors—­all, in fact, except the unaccustomed heat and noise, were most welcome and diverting.  That night she slept the sleep of weariness.

Awakening early, she inaugurated a habit of getting up at once, instead of lolling in bed, and breakfasting there, and reading her mail, as had been her wont before going West.  Then she went over business matters with her aunt, called on her lawyer and banker, took lunch with Rose Maynard, and spent the afternoon shopping.  Strong as she was, the unaccustomed heat and the hard pavements and the jostle of shoppers and the continual rush of sensations wore her out so completely that she did not want any dinner.  She talked to her aunt a while, then went to bed.