It was a bright autumn morning. The wind was chasing immense white clouds across the sky and scattering the leaves of the endless row of trees that stood like sentinels along the high wall. Miss Bennett wanted to hurry across the street at once to the railroad station, although their train would not start for some time; she wanted to get away from the menace of that dark wall--a very perfect piece of masonry. But Lydia had seen it too long from the inside not to be eager to savor a view of it from without. She stared slowly about her like a tourist before some spectacle of awesome beauty. She looked down the alley between the trees and the wall to where on her left was the sharp clean corner of the stonework. She looked to her right, where as the wall rose higher she could see the little watchtower of the prison guard. Then she turned completely round and looked back through the bars at the prison itself. "Don't you think it's a pretty old doorway?" she said. Miss Bennett acknowledged its beauty rather briefly. "Will you tell me why it has 'State Asylum' on the horse block?" she said. "That's just what it is," said Lydia--"an asylum, a real asylum to some of us. It used to be for the insane, Benny. That's why." On the all-day journey to New York Miss Bennett had counted on hearing the full psychological story of the last two years. In her visits to the prison she had found that Lydia wanted to hear of the outside world--not to talk of herself; but now that she was free Miss Bennett hoped this might be changed. She had taken a compartment so they could be by themselves, but the minute the door was shut upon them a funny change came over Lydia. She grew absent and tense, and at last she sprang up and opened it. "It's pleasanter open," she said haughtily, and then she suddenly laughed. "Oh, Benny, to be able to open a closed door!" Miss Bennett began to cry softly. All these months she had been trying to persuade herself that the change in Lydia was due to prison clothes; but now, seeing her dressed as she used to dress, the change was still there. She was thinner, finer--shaped, as it were, by a sharper mold. All her reactions were slower. It took her longer to answer, longer to smile. This gave her--what Lydia had never had before--a touch of mystery, as if her real life were going on somewhere else, below the surface, remote from companionship. She wiped her eyes, thinking that she must not let Lydia guess she thought her changed. Their eyes met. Lydia was discovering a curious fact, which she in her turn thought it better to conceal. It was this: That the figures of her prison life had a depth and reality that made all the rest of the world seem like shadows. Even while she questioned Miss Bennett about her friends she felt as if she were asking about characters in a book which she had not had time to finish. Would Bobby be sure to be at the station? Was Eleanor coming to town that night to see her? Where was Albee?