Evans, in a striped cotton, did not look so different from the lady's maid of the old days, except, as Lydia noticed with vague surprise, she had put on weight. She came with the hurried walk that made her skirts flip out at her heels--the same walk with which she used to come when she was late to dress Lydia for dinner. She almost expected to hear the familiar, "What will you wear, miss?" A dozen memories flashed into her mind--Evans polishing her jewels in the sunlight, Evans locked in the disordered bedroom refusing her confidence to everyone, and then collapsing and confessing to "that man." She looked away from the approaching figure, hoping the girl would take the hint; but no, Evans was drawing up a chair with something of the manner of a hostess to a new arrival. "Oh, Evans!" was Lydia's greeting, very much in her old manner. "You'd better call me Louisa here--I mean, it's first names we use," said Evans. 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." Lydia's nostrils trembled. "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!" "Think what?" "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. "But the law says it was a crime." 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.