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 raced up and down in an alfalfa field, brimming with health and the joy of life.

In the dooryard of a shanty not far away a frowsy woman was chopping wood. In another dooryard another woman was frantically chasing a pig that had broken out of its pen. Her long slatternly skirt tried to trip her as she ran. She heard the wail of a baby and the harsh scream of an older child, followed by the still harsher-toned reprimand of the harassed mother. A skinny-armed girl, little more than a child, with a long flaxen pigtail down her back, was rubbing out clothes at a washtub by the door.

Seated easily on the mule's back and commanding with her eyes the wide stretch of country, she indulged for a moment in the dark fancy that she was God looking out upon these poor children that he had made in his own image and condemned to a life of toilsome grubbing in the dirt that ended only with the grave. Then a flood of the old nausea swept over her and with it a terror and she faced the abysmal truth that she was not God, but only one of these pitiful, groveling creatures, doomed to the same existence and the same end.

She turned the mule's head and rode toward home slowly and dejectedly. From time to time, mindful of the purpose for which she had come, she tried to urge him into a gallop, to make him take a fence or a ditch. But Pete was tired and his rider's hand had grown listless. She felt herself overcome by a great weariness of all things.

By the time she reached home in the late afternoon, the whole neighborhood knew that she had been out and just how long she had been out. And having satisfied themselves that there was no sickness in the family, the women drew their own conclusions.

When she had given up hope that the ride was going to have any effect, she forced herself to try to use the knitting needle. But she was shrinking and clumsy, and at the first stab of pain she flung the instrument violently to the other end of the room. Afterward she dropped it through a wide crack in the kitchen floor so that she would not be able to find it again.