The law compels every prisoner, unless specially exempted, to spend an hour a day in school. Lydia's examination was satisfactory enough to exempt her, but she was set to work in the schoolroom, giving out books, helping with papers, erasing the blackboards, collecting the chalk and erasers. In this way the whole population of the prison--about seventy-five women--passed before her in the different grades. She might have found interest and opportunity, but she was in no humor to be cooperative. She sat there despising them all, feeling her own essential difference--from the bright-eyed Italian girl who had known no English eighteen months before and was now so industrious a student, to the large, calm, unbelievably good-tempered teacher. The atmosphere of the room was not that of a prison school but of a kindergarten. That was what annoyed Lydia--that these women seemed to like to learn. They spelled with enthusiasm--these grown women. Up and down pages they went, spelling "passenger" and "transfer" and "station"--it was evidently a lesson about a trolley car. Was she, Lydia Thorne, expected to join joyfully in some such child-like discipline? In mental arithmetic the competition grew keener. Muriel, a soft-voiced colored girl, made eight and seven amount to thirteen. The class laughed gayly. Lydia covered her face with her hands. "Oh," she thought, "he might better have killed me than this!" It seemed to her that this terrible impersonal routine was turning on her like a great wheel and grinding her into the earth. What incredible perversity it Was that no one--no prisoner, no guard, not even the clear-eyed matron--would see the obvious fact that she was not a criminal as these others were. Had O'Bannon's power reached even into the isolation of prison and dictated that she should be treated like everyone else--she who was so different from these uneducated, emotional, unstable beings about her? It was her former maid, Evans, who destroyed this illusion. The different wards of the prison ate separately; and as Evans was not in her ward they did not meet during the day. They met in the hour after tea, before the prisoners were locked in their cells for the night; an hour when in the large hall they were allowed to read and talk and sew and tat--tatting was very popular just then. Lydia had sunk into a rocking-chair. She could not fix her mind on a book, and she did not know how to sew or tat, and talk for talk's sake had never been one of her amusements. She was thinking "One day has gone by out of perhaps seven years. In seven years I shall be thirty-three," when she felt some one approaching her, and looking up she saw it was Evans.