The tender unspoken sympathy of women who loved her proved comforting
in that trying hour. With the confession ruthlessly made the hard
compression in Carley's breast subsided, and her eyes cleared of a
hateful dimness. When they reached the taxi stand outside the station
Carley felt a rush of hot devitalized air from the street. She seemed
not to be able to get air into her lungs.
"Isn't it dreadfully hot?" she asked.
"This is a cool spell to what we had last week," replied Eleanor.
"Cool!" exclaimed Carley, as she wiped her moist face. "I wonder if you
Easterners know the real significance of words."
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.