Westmoreland stood, big and compassionate, at the foot of the bed.  His ruddy face showed wan and behind his glasses his gray tired eyes winked and blinked.

“There must be,” said the Doctor, as if to himself, “some eternal vast reservoir somewhere, that stores up all this terrible total of unnecessary suffering—­the cruel and needless suffering inflicted upon children and animals, in particular.  Perhaps it’s a spiritual serum used for the saving of the race.  Perhaps races higher up than we use it—­as we use rabbits and guinea-pigs.  No, no, nothing’s wasted; there’s a forward end to pain, somewhere.”  He looked down at the child and shook his head doubtfully: 

“But when all is said and done,” he muttered, “what do such as these get out of it?  Nothing—­so far as we can see.  They’re victims, they and the innocent beasts, thrust into a world which tortures and devours them.  Why?  Why?  Why?”

“There is nothing to do but leave that everlasting Why to God,” said I, painfully.

The Butterfly Man looked up and one saw that cold sword-straight, diamond-hard something in his eyes: 

“Parson,” said he, grimly, “you’re a million miles off the right track—­and you know it.  Leaving things to God—­things like poor kids dying because they’re gouged out of their right to live—­is just about as rotten stupid and wrong as it can well be.  God’s all right; he does his part of the job.  You do yours, and what happens?  Why, my butterflies answer that!  I’m punk on your catechism, and if this is all it can teach I hope I die punk on it; but as near as I can make out, original sin is leaving things like this”—­and he looked at his small friend with her doll on her arm—­“to God, instead of tackling the job yourself and straightening it out.”

The child’s mother, a gaunt creature without a trace of youth left in her, although she could not have been much more than thirty, shambled over to a chair on the other side of the bed.  She wore a faded red calico wrapper—­a scrap of it had made the doll’s frock—­and a blue-checked apron with holes in it.  Her hair was drawn painfully back from her forehead, and there was a wispy fringe of it on the back of her scraggy neck.  In her dull eyes glimmered nothing but the innate uneasiness of those who are always in need, and her mouth had drawn itself into the shape of a horseshoe.  There is no luck in a horseshoe hung thus on a woman’s face.  One might fancy she felt no emotion, her whole demeanor was so apathetic; but of a sudden she leaned over and took up one of the thick shining curls; half smiling, she began to wrap it about her finger.

“I useter be right smart proud o’ Louisa’s hair,” she remarked in a drawling, listless voice.  “She come by it from them uppidy folks o’ her pa’s.  I’ve saw her when she wasn’t much more ‘n hair an’ eyes, times her pa was laid up with the misery in his chest, an’ me with nothin’ but piecework weeks on end.