As before the foothills called her, and she went on until she came to
a very high one.
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.
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