"But it's different. Oh, I don't suppose you'll understand--but it's different. Having one's clothes fumigated and one's hair cut short is a joke--it's funny, it's a joke, so I laughed. But being obliged to have everything exactly straight--every damned fork in its damned place----" he stopped suddenly and ground his teeth. "It's the little things that are so infernal and degrading; big things one has to make oneself big to tackle, somehow, and it helps. But the little things ... one just cries. Listen, Janey. Once a fortnight they used to come and search us in our cells. We used to stand there just in our vests and drawers, and they'd pass their hands over us. Well, I could stand that, for it was horrible--sickening and monstrous and horrible. But when you were punished just because your tins weren't in the exact mathematical space allotted to them--it wasn't horrible or monstrous at all, just childish and silly; and when a dozen childish and silly things crowd into your day, why, you become childish and silly yourself, that's all. What I can't forgive prison isn't that it's made me hard or wicked or wretched, but that it's made me childish and silly--so if I deserved hanging when I went in, I'm hardly worth spanking now I've come out." "What I can't forgive prison is the miserable ideas you've picked up in it." "There aren't any ideas in prison--only habits." He hid his face for a minute in the coverlet. Janet's hand crept over his hair. "You'll soon be happy again, old boy," she whispered. "Perhaps I shall." "I hope to God you will--and now, dear, it's dreadfully late, and you're tired. Hadn't you better go to bed?" He turned to her impulsively. "You'll stick to me, you and Len?--whatever I'm like--even--even if I'm not quite the same as I used to be." Strange to say, her impression of him was of an infinite childishness. She realised with a pang that while for the last three years she and Leonard had been growing older in their contact with a world of love and sorrow, this boy, in spite of all he had suffered, had merely been shut up with a few rules and habits. In many ways he was younger than when he first went to gaol, more ignorant and more childish--he had lost his grip of life. In other ways he was terribly, horribly older. She put her arms around his neck, and kissed this pathetic old child, this poor childish old man. CHAPTER II SHOVELSTRODE A row of lights gleamed from Shovelstrode Manor, on the north slope of Ashdown Forest. Shovelstrode was in Sussex, and looked straight over the woods into Surrey and Kent. Round it the pines heaped up till they gave a ragged edge to the hill behind it. Into the house they cast many shadows, and even when at night they were curtained out of the lighted rooms, one could hear them rustling and thrumming a strange tune.