out prayer when I was a kid.
No, I don't pray."

"It's a great comfort, praying is." Carmencita's hand was taken out of
her pocket and slipped through the arm of her disillusioned friend.
"Sometimes you're just bound to pray. It's like breathing--you can't
help it. It--it just rises up. I prayed yesterday for--for something,
and it pretty near happened, but--"

"And you think your praying helped to make it happen!" Mr. Leimberg
drew Carmencita's hand farther through his arm, and his lips twisted
in contemptuous pity. "You think there is a magician up--oh,
somewhere, who makes things happen, do you? Think--"

"Yes." Carmencita's feet skipped in spite of the clogging snow. "I
think that somewhere there is Somebody who knows about everything, but
I don't think He means us to ask for anything we want just because we
want it and don't do a lick to get it. I've been praying for months
and months about my temper and stamping my foot when I get mad, and
if I remember in time and hold down the up-comings my prayers are
always answered; but when I let go and forget--" Carmencita whistled a
long, low, significant note. "I guess then I don't want to be
answered. I want to smash something. But I didn't pray yesterday about
tempers and stamping. It was pretty near a miracle that I asked for,
though I said I wasn't asking for miracles or--"

"All people who pray ask for miracles. Since the days when men feared
floods and famines and pestilence and evil spirits they have cried out
for protection and propitiated what to them were gods." The
Damanarkist spit upon the ground as if to spew contempt of pretense
and cupidity. "I've no patience with it. If there is a God, He knows
the cursed struggle life is with most of us; and if there isn't,
prayer is but a waste of time."

Carmencita lifted her eyes and for a moment looked in the dark, thin
face, embittered by the losing battle of life, as if she had not heard
aright, then she laughed softly.

"If I didn't know you, dear Mr. Damanarkist, I'd think you really
meant it--what you said. And you don't. I don't guess there's anybody
in all the world who doesn't pray sometimes. Something in you does it
by itself, and you can't keep it back. You just wait until you feel
all lost and lonely and afraid, or so glad you are ready to sing out
loud, then you'll do it--inside, if you don't speak out. If I prayed
harder to have more sense and not talk so much, and not say what I
think about peopl