Go away? It was the last thing she wanted to do. "No, no!" she said quickly. "I must stay here!" "Well, marry me and stay here." She shook her head, trying to explain to him--she wouldn't ever marry. She had found a new clew to life and wanted to follow it alone. She had interest, intense, vital interest, to give to life and affairs--yes, and even people; but she had not love. Human relationships couldn't make or mar life for her any more. She wanted to work--nothing else. She paused, and in the pause the dining-room door opened and Eleanor came in. Eleanor had been up at dawn to get a train from the Adirondacks in time to meet Lydia at the station, and of course the train had been late. Would Lydia put her up for the night? Lydia's cry of welcome did not sound like a person to whom all human relationships had become indifferent. Indeed Eleanor was the person she wanted most to see. Eleanor was not emotional, or rather she expressed her emotion by a heightened intellectual sensitiveness. She wouldn't cry, she wouldn't regard Lydia as a shorn lamb the way Miss Bennett did, nor yet would she assume that she was utterly unchanged, as all the rest of her friends might. Eleanor's manner was almost commonplace. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that she left the introduction of anything dramatic to Lydia's choice. Bobby soon went away and left the two women together. They went upstairs to Lydia's bedroom, and in their dressing gowns, with chairs drawn to the fire, they talked. They talked with long pauses between them. No one but Eleanor would have allowed those long silences to pass uninterrupted, but she was wise enough to know they were the very essence of companionship. Though Eleanor asked several questions about the details of prison life, she was too wise to ask anything about the fundamental change which she felt had taken place in Lydia. She did not betray that she felt there was a change. She wondered whether Lydia knew it herself. It was hard to say, for the girl, always inexpert with verbal expressions, had become more so in the two years of solitude and contemplation. Whatever spontaneity of speech she had had was gone. She was, Eleanor thought, like a person using an unfamiliar tongue, aware of the difficulty of putting thought into words. She could not help being touched--and a little amused--at the seriousness with which Lydia mentioned her late companions; Lydia, who had always been so selective about her own friends and so scornful about everybody else's. She spoke of Evans, the pallid little thief, as if light had flowed from her as from an incarnation of the Buddha. Seeing that Lydia had caught some reflection of the thought, Eleanor thought it better to put it into words. "Now, don't tell me, my dear," she said, "that you, too, have discovered that all criminals are pure white souls."