After a little while she was taken through a long corridor directly to a spacious bathroom. Her clothes, wrapped in a sheet, were borne away. At this Lydia gave a short laugh. It pleased her as a sign that the routine in her case was palpably ridiculous--to take away her things as if they were infected. She was given a bath, a nightgown of most unfriendly texture was handed to her, and presently she was locked in her cell--still in possession of her hair. She felt like an animal in a trap--could imagine herself running along the floor smelling at cracks for some hope of escape, with that strange head motion, up and down, up and down, of a newly caged animal. More even than the locks and bolts, she minded the open grille in the door, like an eye through which she might at any moment of the day or night be spied upon. At every footstep she prepared herself to meet with a defiant stare the eyes of an inspector. The cell was hardly a cell, but a room larger than most hall bedrooms. The bed had a white cover; so had the table; and the window, though barred, was large. But this made no impression on Lydia. She was conscious of being locked in. Only her pride and her hard common sense kept her from beating at the door with her bare hands and making one of those screaming outbreaks so familiar to prison officials. She who had never been coerced was now to be coerced in every action, surrounded everywhere by symbols of coercion. She who had been so intense an individualist that she had discarded a French model if she saw other women wearing it was now to wear a striped gingham dress of universal pattern. She whose competent white hands had never done a piece of useful work was sentenced to not less than three or more than seven years of hard labor. What would that be--hard labor? The vision of that giant negro working hopelessly at his loom was before her all night long. All night long she wandered up and down her cell, now and then laying her hand on the door to assure herself of the incredible fact that it was locked. Only for a few minutes at dawn she fell asleep, forgetting the catastrophe, the malignant fate that had overtaken her, and woke imagining herself at home. When her cell door was unlocked she stepped out into the same corridor along which she had passed the night before. She found it a blaze of sunlight. Great patches of sunlight fell in barred patterns on the boards of the floor, scrubbed as white as the deck of a man-of-war. Remembering the gloomy granite loopholes of her imagination, this sun seemed insolently bright.