The fact had already been called to her former employer's attention by Muriel, who had done nothing but call her Lydia in a futile effort to be friendly. She steeled herself to hear it from Evans, who, however, managed to avoid it. She gossiped of the prison news, and tried to cheer and help this newcomer with whatever wisdom she had acquired. Lydia neither moved nor answered nor again looked up.
"As the matron says," Evans ran on, "the worst is over when you get here. It's the trial and the sentence and the journey that's worst. After a week or so you'll begin to get used to it."
"I shall never get used to it," she said. "I don't belong here. What I did was no crime."
There was a short pause. Lydia waited for Evans' cordial agreement to what seemed a self-evident assertion. None came. Instead she said gently, as she might have explained to a child, "Oh, miss, they all think that!"
"That what they did was no real harm--that they were unjustly condemned. There isn't one here who won't tell you that. The worse they are the more they think it."
Lydia had looked up from her contemplation of the gray rag rug. No sermon could have stopped her as short as that--the idea that she was exactly like all the other inmates. She protested, more to herself than to Evans.
"But it is different! What I did was an accident, not a deliberate crime."
Evans smiled her old, rare, gentle smile.
Horrible! Horrible but true! Lydia was to find that every woman there felt exactly as she did; that she was a special case; that she had done nothing wrong; that her conviction had been brought about by an incompetent lawyer, a vindictive district attorney, a bribed jury, a perjured witness. The first thing each of them wanted to explain was that she--like Lydia--was a special case.
The innocent-looking little girl who had committed bigamy. "Isn't it to laugh?" said she. "Gee, when you think what men do to us! And I get five years for not knowing he was dead! And what harm did I do him anyway?"
And the gaunt elderly stenographer who had run an illicit mail-order business for her employers. One of them had evidently occupied her whole horizon, taking the place of all law, moral and judicial.
"He said it was positively legal," she kept repeating, believing evidently that the judge and jury had been pitifully misinformed.