Their children and
their children's children, as the years rolled by into the future, would
hold their heads higher and prouder. Some things could never die in the
hearts and the blood of a race. These boys, and the girls who had the
supreme glory of being loved by them, must be the ones to revive the
Americanism of their forefathers. Nature and God would take care of
the slackers, the cowards who cloaked their shame with bland excuses
of home service, of disability, and of dependence.
Carley saw two forces in life--the destructive and constructive. On the one
side greed, selfishness, materialism: on the other generosity, sacrifice,
and idealism. Which of them builded for the future? She saw men as wolves,
sharks, snakes, vermin, and opposed to them men as lions and eagles. She
saw women who did not inspire men to fare forth to seek, to imagine, to
dream, to hope, to work, to fight. She began to have a glimmering of what a
woman might be.
That night she wrote swiftly and feverishly, page after page, to Glenn,
only to destroy what she had written. She could not keep her heart out of
her words, nor a hint of what was becoming a sleepless and eternal regret.
She wrote until a late hour, and at last composed a letter she knew did not
ring true, so stilted and restrained was it in all passages save those
concerning news of Glenn's comrade and of her own friends.
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