said Sally, decidedly. "I'm not sorry."

"Then what are you so depressed about?"

"Am I depressed?" She sat up again and turned her pillow. "Oh, I
haven't said my prayers yet." She began to throw off the bed-clothes.

"Well, you're not going to get out of bed, are you?"

"Yes."

She slid off the bed on to the floor, shuddering as her feet touched
the cold linoleum carpet. Habit was strong in her still. She believed
in no fixed and certain dogma, but she had never broken the custom
of saying her prayers; never even been able to rid herself of the
belief that except upon the knees on the hard floor prayers were of
little intrinsic value. That she had always been taught; and though
the greater lessons--the untangling of the entangled Trinity, the
mystery of the bread and wine--had lost their meaning in her mind,
ever since her father's predicament, yet she still held fondly to
the simple habits of her childhood.

When Janet saw her finally huddled on her knees, her head, with its
masses of gold hair, buried in the arms flung out appealingly before
her, she turned and blew out the candle. Sally never answered
questions when she was saying her prayers, though Janet frequently
addressed them to her, and took the answers for granted.

There she knelt in the darkness, while Janet dug the accustomed grove
in her pillow and went to sleep.

What does a woman pray for--what does any one pray for--whom do they
pray to, when the composition of their mental attitude towards the
Highest is a plethora of doubts? Yet they pray.

Instinctively at night, by the side of their beds, their knees
bent--or there is some genuflexion in their heart which answers just
as well--they drop into the attitude of prayer. And they all begin
in the same way--O God-- And not one of them has the faintest notion
of whom or what or why that God is.

Whoever, whatever, wherever He is, His power must be supreme to make
itself felt through the thick veil of doubt and despair that hangs
so heavily about His identity.

Sally Bishop, who could not say the Apostles' Creed with unswerving
conscience--to whom the story of the Resurrection was fogged,
blurred with a thousand inconsistencies--even she could not dispense
with that moment in each day, that moment of abandonment--the
flinging of one's burden of questions at the feet of a deity whose
identity it would be impossible to define.

For many minutes she stayed there on her knees, her arms wound ro