If within us earthworms there is the Divine Spark of the Deity, if we are in truth His sons and daughters, she reasoned, then we have some rights that this Deity is bound to respect. What earthly father would knowingly permit his children to stumble blindly along dangerous pathways into dangerous places? What earthly father would demand that his children rush headlong into danger unquestioningly? What earthly father would create hearts only to crush them? Why had He thrust human beings onto this earth against their will, without their volition, to suffer the tortures of the damned? Why had He created this huge joke of an animal, part body, part soul, all nerves keen to catch at suffering, only to laugh at it? Why had He taken the pains to fashion this Opera Bouffe of a world at all? Why had He made of it a slate upon which to draw lines of human beings, then wipe them aimlessly off as would any child? For mere amusement after the manner of children? If not, then why? Why? Why? She could have screamed out this "Why" into the way of the wind. She wanted to ask Him why he whirled body-clad souls out of the Nowhere, dragged them by the hair of their heads through ways thronged with thorns, then thrust them back again into the Nowhere, to lie stone still in their chill damp graves, in their straight grave clothes, awaiting His pleasure? Why had He seen fit to fashion some all body and no soul? Why had He made others all soul? Why had He created the Seths to weary for love of the Celias and the Cyclonas to eat out their hearts for love of the Seths? Some of these questions she had been wont to put to Seth, who had answered them as best he could in his patient way. There was a hidden meaning in it all, he had said, meaningless as it often seemed. Some meaning that would show itself in God's good time. We are uncut diamonds, was one of his explanations. We had much need of polishing before we could attain sufficient brilliancy to adorn a crown. We must have faith and hope, he had said. Much faith and hope and patience. And above all we must have the belief that it would all come out in the Great White Wash of Eternity, in God's good time. But there were those who succumbed before God's good time, who would never know the explanation until they had passed into the Beyond, where they would cease to care. She rode on and on, asking herself these questions and finding no answer in the whirl and eddy of dust blown at her by the wind, in the limitless stretch of prairie, in the suffocating thickness of heat which enveloped the way of the wind. Intense heat. Sultry, parching, enervating, sure precursor, if she had thought to remember, if she had been less engrossed in the bitterness of her questionings, of a storm. Soon, aroused by the intensity of this heat, which burned like the blast from an oven, she whirled about and turned her broncho's head the other way. It was time, for that way lay her home and danger threatened it.