No, God was not responsible. She could have made a better world
herself--a finer, squarer world. This being so, then there was no God.
God could not make a botch. The matron had been wrong, her mother had
been wrong. Then there was no immortality, and Bert, wild and crazy
Bert, falling at her front gate with his foolish death-cry, was right.
One was a long time dead.

Looking thus at life, shorn of its superrational sanctions, Saxon
floundered into the morass of pessimism. There was no justification for
right conduct in the universe, no square deal for her who had earned
reward, for the millions who worked like animals, died like animals,
and were a long time and forever dead. Like the hosts of more learned
thinkers before her, she concluded that the universe was unmoral and
without concern for men.

And now she sat crushed in greater helplessness than when she had
included God in the scheme of injustice. As long as God was, there was
always chance for a miracle, for some supernatural intervention, some
rewarding with ineffable bliss. With God missing, the world was a
trap. Life was a trap. She was like a linnet, caught by small boys and
imprisoned in a cage. That was because the linnet was stupid. But she
rebelled. She fluttered and beat her soul against the hard face of
things as did the linnet against the bars of wire. She was not stupid.
She did not belong in the trap. She would fight her way out of the trap.
There must be such a way out. When canal boys and rail-splitters, the
lowliest of the stupid lowly, as she had read in her school history,
could find their way out and become presidents of the nation and rule
over even the clever ones in their automobiles, then could she find her
way out and win to the tiny reward she craved--Billy, a little love, a
little happiness. She would not mind that the universe was unmoral, that
there was no God, no immortality. She was willing to go into the black
grave and remain in its blackness forever, to go into the salt vats and
let the young men cut her dead flesh to sausage-meat, if--if only she
could get her small meed of happiness first.

How she would work for that happiness! How she would appreciate it, make
the most of each least particle of it! But how was she to do it. Where
was the path? She could not vision it. Her eyes showed her only the
smudge of San Francisco, the smudge of Oakland, where men were breaking
heads and killing one another, where babies were dyi