Riding along down the canyon, under its looming walls, Carley wondered

that if unawares to her these physical aspects of Arizona could have

become more significant than she realized. The thought had confronted

her before. Here, as always, she fought it and denied it by the simple

defense of elimination. Yet refusing to think of a thing when it seemed

ever present was not going to do forever. Insensibly and subtly it might

get a hold on her, never to be broken. Yet it was infinitely easier to

dream than to think.

But the thought encroached upon her that it was not a dreamful habit of

mind she had fallen into of late. When she dreamed or mused she lived

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vaguely and sweetly over past happy hours or dwelt in enchanted fancy

upon a possible future. Carley had been told by a Columbia professor

that she was a type of the present age--a modern young woman of

materialistic mind. Be that as it might, she knew many things seemed

loosening from the narrowness and tightness of her character, sloughing

away like scales, exposing a new and strange and susceptible softness

of fiber. And this blank habit of mind, when she did not think, and

now realized that she was not dreaming, seemed to be the body of Carley

Burch, and her heart and soul stripped of a shell. Nerve and emotion

and spirit received something from her surroundings. She absorbed her

environment. She felt. It was a delightful state. But when her own

consciousness caused it to elude her, then she both resented and

regretted. Anything that approached permanent attachment to this crude

and untenanted West Carley would not tolerate for a moment. Reluctantly

she admitted it had bettered her health, quickened her blood, and quite

relegated Florida and the Adirondacks, to little consideration.

"Well, as I told Glenn," soliloquized Carley, "every time I'm almost

won over a little to Arizona she gives me a hard jolt. I'm getting near

being mushy today. Now let's see what I'll get. I suppose that's my

pessimism or materialism. Funny how Glenn keeps saying its the jolts,

the hard knocks, the fights that are best to remember afterward. I don't

get that at all."

Five miles below West Fork a road branched off and climbed the left side

of the canyon. It was a rather steep road, long and zigzaging, and full

of rocks and ruts. Carley did not enjoy ascending it, but she preferred

the going up to coming down. It took half an hour to climb.

Once up on the flat cedar-dotted desert she was met, full in the face,

by a hot dusty wind coming from the south. Carley searched her pockets

for her goggles, only to ascertain that she had forgotten them. Nothing,

except a freezing sleety wind, annoyed and punished Carley so much as

a hard puffy wind, full of sand and dust. Somewhere along the first few

miles of this road she was to meet Glenn. If she turned back for any

cause he would be worried, and, what concerned her more vitally, he

would think she had not the courage to face a little dust. So Carley

rode on.




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