“I know. About like my own school in Kansas—the high-school principal would have been an undertaker if he’d had more capital.... Gee! principal and capital—might make a real cunning pun out of that if I worked over it a little. I know.... Go to church?”
“Why—why, yes, of course.”
“Which god do you favor at present—Unitarian or Catholic or Christian Science or Seventh-Day Advent?”
“Why, it’s the same—”
“Now don’t spring that ‘it’s the same God’ stuff on me. It isn’t the same God that simply hones for candles and music in an Episcopal Church and gives the Plymouth Brotherhood a private copyright revelation that organs and candles are wicked.”
“You’re terribly sacrilegious.”
“You don’t believe any such thing. Or else you’d lam me—same as they used to do in the crusades. You don’t really care a hang.”
“No, I really don’t care!” she was amazed to hear herself admit.
“Of course, I’m terribly crude and vulgar, but then what else can you be in dealing with a bunch of churches that haven’t half the size or beauty of farmers’ red barns? And yet the dubs go on asserting that they believe the church is God’s house. If I were God, I’d sure object to being worse housed than the cattle. But, gosh! let’s pass that up. If I started in on what I think of almost anything—churches or schools, or this lying advertising game—I’d yelp all night, and you could always answer me that I’m merely a neurotic failure, while the big guns that I jump on own motor-cars.” He stopped his rapid tirade, chucked a lump of sugar at an interrogative cat which was making the round of the tables, scowled, and suddenly fired at her:
“What do you think of me?”