"I hate God!" said Carolina, calmly. "I used to hate Him, too," said Rosemary. "In the old thought there was nothing else to do, for a just mind, than to hate Him. We had made an image of hate and vengeance and set it up to worship and called it God." "We? Did we do it?" "Of course! Who else?" "Then it is all our fault?" "It certainly is not God’s fault," said Rosemary. "He has declared Himself to be Love Incarnate. If we have been stupid enough to endow Him with human attributes of our own distorted imagination, is He to blame?" "He never answered a prayer of mine in all my life!" cried Carolina, passionately, looking at the ceiling as if to make sure that God heard her accusation, and as if she hoped to irritate Him into hearing future prayers. "Nor of mine, either, until I learned how to pray." "Who discovered the new way? That Eddy woman?" "Mrs. Eddy did." "How, I should like to know? Why was all this given to her to know and not to some man?" "By the way," said Rosemary, as if changing the subject, "I hear that you speak both Japanese and Russian and that you did some important interpreting at a banquet on board the Kaiser’s yacht at Cowes, last spring. Did you?" "I believe so," said Carolina, wearily. "However did you manage to master two such awfully difficult languages?" "I studied years to do it." "How strange that my brother was not called upon to do that interpreting," said Rosemary, in a musing tone. "He was at that banquet, and he is a man." Carolina opened her lips to make an incautious reply, but caught herself just in time. A gleam in Rosemary’s eyes warned her. "I see," she said, reddening. "But I must say you baited the hook skilfully." "I had to, in order to catch you," said Rosemary. Carolina turned her head on her pillow restlessly. "Tell me about how you came to accept it," she said, pleadingly. "Well, I was so abnormally miserable! I had everything in the world I wanted--apparently, yet my home was full of discord. I had only a big, beautiful house. I wanted the love of a certain man. He held aloof while all the others were at my feet. I prayed wildly to my God for help, and He mocked me. Then I grew bitter and vengeful. I vowed that I would have all that life held without God, for it seemed to me, in my vicious interpretation of Him, that every time He saw me poke my head out of my hole, He hit it--" "Just to show that He could!" cried Carolina, almost with a scream of comprehension.