had the pioneer stock before her. Still it must be
so. Here she sat, nothing to eat at home, her love-husband changed to a
brute beast and lying in jail, her arms and heart empty of the babe that
would have been there if only the stupid ones had not made a shambles of
her front yard in their wrangling over jobs.

She sat there, racking her brain, the smudge of Oakland at her back,
staring across the bay at the smudge of Ban Francisco. Yet the sun was
good; the wind was good, as was the keen salt air in her nostrils;
the blue sky, flecked with clouds, was good. All the natural world
was right, and sensible, and beneficent. It was the man-world that was
wrong, and mad, and horrible. Why were the stupid stupid? Was it a law
of God? No; it could not be. God had made the wind, and air, and sun.
The man-world was made by man, and a rotten job it was. Yet, and she
remembered it well, the teaching in the orphan asylum, God had made
everything. Her mother, too, had believed this, had believed in this
God. Things could not be different. It was ordained.

For a time Saxon sat crushed, helpless. Then smoldered protest, revolt.
Vainly she asked why God had it in for her. What had she done to
deserve such fate? She briefly reviewed her life in quest of deadly sins
committed, and found them not. She had obeyed her mother; obeyed Cady,
the saloon-keeper, and Cady's wife; obeyed the matron and the other
women in the orphan asylum; obeyed Tom when she came to live in his
house, and never run in the streets because he didn't wish her to.
At school she had always been honorably promoted, and never had her
deportment report varied from one hundred per cent. She had worked from
the day she left school to the day of her marriage. She had been a good
worker, too. The little Jew who ran the paper box factory had almost
wept when she quit. It was the same at the cannery. She was among the
high-line weavers when the jute mills closed down. I And she had kept
straight. It was not as if she had been ugly or unattractive. She had
known her temptations and encountered her dangers. The fellows had been
crazy about her. They had run after her, fought over her, in a way to
turn most girls' heads. But she had kept straight. And then had come
Billy, her reward. She had devoted herself to him, to his house, to all
that would nourish his love; and now she and Billy were sinking down
into this senseless vortex of misery and heartbreak of the man-made
world.