Mary's childhood had heard some of the phraseology of evangelicalism. She understood, but she had come to receive worldly, not spiritual, warmth.
"No," she said, "I ain't."
The "worker," however, was accustomed to that reply. He patted her shoulder.
"Don't you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ?" he asked.
"Well," said Mary, "I never thought much about Him."
She looked at the floor. She was cold and hungry and afraid.
"Then," responded the man, with genuine earnestness, "you ought to begin to think. No man knoweth the hour of His comin'. He is ready with the Free Gift. Don't you want to come to Him?"
Mary's life had been one in which there had been small time for the cultivation of religious emotion, and no time at all for the cultivation of religious thought. At her home she had learned as much by rote as she had had to learn, but what she got she held only as so many tasks performed. The words were lessons to be mastered; if they had any relation to facts, those facts were things not to be faced until an age of discretion, and, pending the arrival of that age, the lessons had been stored away with a bland, childish practicality. What followed later had driven out all that preceded it. The shock of her capture; the wild, new order of existence; the endeavor to escape; the battle of service among new conditions; and, at last, the dulling of all the finer sensibilities and the final fight for a mere chance to continue alive—these were circumstances neither propitious to theology nor favorable to faith.
She glanced at the mission-worker, and then glanced away.
"I dunno," she said. "I guess I ain't the kind of woman religion can do much for."