Crane personifies Fate as an old crone:
If this old ninny-woman, Fate, cannot do better than this, she should be deprived of the management of men’s fortunes. She is an old hen who knows not her intention. If she has decided to drown me, why did she not do it in the beginning and save me all this trouble? The whole affair is absurd.... But no; she cannot mean to drown me. She dare not drown me. She cannot drown me. Not after all this work.
Fate is personified because Crane wants to demonstrate how humans have the tendency to ascribe a will to nature. Crane was an atheist, so the personification of Fate is meant to show how, even though the world is arbitrary, humans feel the need to create a higher power that determines their lives.
Here, the men need something to lash out against, and then feel even angrier when there is nothing to lash out against. There is also a little bit of dark humor in play: the men want to fire fate for being “absurd,” but part of the point of the story is to convince the reader that life is absurd. In line with the tenets of American Naturalism, there is no bureaucratic Fate, minus the laws of physics and human psychology, and those laws are, in fact, uncaring.
The reference to fate being incarnated as an old woman also resonates with Greco-Roman mythology, in which the three fates are oftentimes depicted as three old women who weave the fate of mortals out of thread.
