The innocent-looking little girl who had committed bigamy. "Isn't it to laugh?" said she. "Gee, when you think what men do to us! And I get five years for not knowing he was dead! And what harm did I do him anyway?" And the gaunt elderly stenographer who had run an illicit mail-order business for her employers. One of them had evidently occupied her whole horizon, taking the place of all law, moral and judicial. "He said it was positively legal," she kept repeating, believing evidently that the judge and jury had been pitifully misinformed. And there was the stout middle-aged woman with sandy hair and a bland competent manner--she was competent. She had made a specialty of real-estate frauds. "I was entirely within the law," she said, as one hardly interested to argue the matter. And there were gay young mulatto girls and bright-eyed Italians, who all said the same thing--"everyone does it; only the other girl squealed on me"--and there were the egotists, who were never going to get into this mess again. Some girls had to steal for a living; they had brains enough to go straight. Even the woman who had attempted to kill her husband felt she had been absolutely within her rights and after hearing her story Lydia was inclined to agree with her. Only Evans seemed to feel that her sentence had been just. "No, it wasn't right what I did," she said, and she stood out like a star, superior to her surroundings. She only was learning and growing in the terrible routine. It soon began to seem to Lydia that this little fool of a maid of hers was a great person. Why? Locked in her cell from dark to daylight, Lydia spent much of the time in thinking. Like a great many people in this world, she had never thought before. She had particularly arranged her life so she should not think. Most people who think they think really dream. Lydia was no dreamer. She lacked the romantic imagination that makes dreams magical. Clear-sighted and pessimistic when she looked at life, the reality had seemed hideous, and she looked away as quickly as possible, looked back to the material beauty with which she had surrounded herself and the pleasant activities always within reach. Now, cut off from pleasure and beauty, it seemed to her for the first time as if there were a real adventure in having the courage to examine the whole scheme of life. Its pattern could hardly be more hideous than that of every day. What was she? What reason had she for living? What use could life be put to? What was the truth? A verse she could not place kept running through her head: _Quand j'ai connu la Verite, J'ai cru que c'etait une amie; Quand je l'ai comprise et sentie, J'en etais deja degoute._ _Et pourtant elle est eternelle, Et ceux qui se sont passes d'elle Ici-bas ont tout ignore._ She had been deliberately ignorant of much of life--of everything.