There was a raw unheated wound in Carley’s heart.  Seldom had she permitted herself to think about it, let alone to probe it with hard materialistic queries.  But custom to her was as inexorable as life.  If she chose to live in the world she must conform to its customs.  For a woman marriage was the aim and the end and the all of existence.  Nevertheless, for Carley it could not be without love.  Before she had gone West she might have had many of the conventional modern ideas about women and marriage.  But because out there in the wilds her love and perception had broadened, now her arraignment of herself and her sex was bigger, sterner, more exacting.  The months she had been home seemed fuller than all the months of her life.  She had tried to forget and enjoy; she had not succeeded; but she had looked with far-seeing eyes at her world.  Glenn Kilbourne’s tragic fate had opened her eyes.

Either the world was all wrong or the people in it were.  But if that were an extravagant and erroneous supposition, there certainly was proof positive that her own small individual world was wrong.  The women did not do any real work; they did not bear children; they lived on excitement and luxury.  They had no ideals.  How greatly were men to blame?  Carley doubted her judgment here.  But as men could not live without the smiles and comradeship and love of women, it was only natural that they should give the women what they wanted.  Indeed, they had no choice.  It was give or go without.  How much of real love entered into the marriages among her acquaintances?  Before marriage Carley wanted a girl to be sweet, proud, aloof, with a heart of golden fire.  Not attainable except through love!  It would be better that no children be born at all unless born of such beautiful love.  Perhaps that was why so few children were born.  Nature’s balance and revenge!  In Arizona Carley had learned something of the ruthlessness and inevitableness of nature.  She was finding out she had learned this with many other staggering facts.

“I love Glenn still,” she whispered, passionately, with trembling lips, as she faced the tragic-eyed image of herself in the mirror.  “I love him more—­ more.  Oh, my God!  If I were honest I’d cry out the truth!  It is terrible. . . .  I will always love him.  How then could I marry any other man?  I would be a lie, a cheat.  If I could only forget him—­only kill that love.  Then I might love another man—­and if I did love him—­no matter what I had felt or done before, I would be worthy.  I could feel worthy.  I could give him just as much.  But without such love I’d give only a husk—­a body without soul.”

Love, then, was the sacred and holy flame of life that sanctioned the begetting of children.  Marriage might be a necessity of modern time, but it was not the vital issue.  Carley’s anguish revealed strange and hidden truths.  In some inexplicable way Nature struck a terrible balance—­revenged herself upon a people who had no children, or who brought into the world children not created by the divinity of love, unyearned for, and therefore somehow doomed to carry on the blunders and burdens of life.