With a swift kiss she was gone and, meeting the Damanarkist, who was waiting outside the door, they went down the three flights of steps and out into the street. The wind was biting, and, turning up the collar of her coat, Carmencita put her hands in her pockets and made effort to walk rapidly through the thick snow into which her feet sank with each step. For some minutes conversation was impossible. Heads ducked to keep out of their faces the fast-falling flakes, they trudged along in silence until within a few doors of Mother McNeil's house, and then Carmencita looked up. "Do--do you ever pray, Mr. Leimberg--pray hard, I mean?" "Pray!" The Damanarkist drew in his breath and laughed with smothered scorn. "Pray! Why should I pray? I cut 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.