She had belonged to a class. She had grown to womanhood in
it. She had loved, and in loving had escaped the evil of her day, if not
its taint. She had lived only for herself. Conscience had awakened--but,
alas! too late. She had overthrown the sordid, self-seeking habit of life;
she had awakened to real womanhood; she had fought the insidious spell of
modernity and she had defeated it; she had learned the thrill of taking
root in new soil, the pain and joy of labor, the bliss of solitude, the
promise of home and love and motherhood. But she had gathered all these
marvelous things to her soul too late for happiness.
"Now it is answered," she declared aloud. "That is what has happened? . . .
And all that is past. . . . Is there anything left? If so what?"
She flung her query out to the winds of the desert. But the desert seemed
too gray, too vast, too remote, too aloof, too measureless. It was not
concerned with her little life. Then she turned to the mountain kingdom.
It seemed overpoweringly near at hand. It loomed above her to pierce the
fleecy clouds. It was only a stupendous upheaval of earth-crust, grown over
at the base by leagues and leagues of pine forest, belted along the middle
by vast slanting zigzag slopes of aspen, rent and riven toward the heights
into canyon and gorge, bared above to cliffs and corners of craggy rock,
whitened at the sky-piercing peaks by snow.
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