She went through a period of despair, all the worse because, like a face in a nightmare, it was featureless. It was despair, not over the fact that she was in prison but over the whole scheme of the universe, the futile hordes of human beings living and hoping and failing and passing away. Despair paralyzed her bodily activities. Her mind, even her giant will, failed her. She could neither sleep nor eat, and after a week of it was taken to the hospital. The rumor ran through the prison that she was going mad--that was the way it always began. She lay in the hospital two days, hardly moving. Her face seemed to have shrunk and her eyes to have grown large and fiery. The doctor came and talked to her. She would not answer him; she would not meet his gaze; she would do nothing but draw long unnatural breaths like sighs. In the room next to her there was a mother with a six-months-old baby. Lydia at the best of times had never been much interested in babies, though all young animals made a certain appeal to her. Her friends' babies, swaddled and guarded by nurses, lacked the spontaneous charm of a kitten or a puppy. This baby, however--Joseph his name was, and he was always so referred to--was different. He spent a great deal of time alone, sitting erect in his white iron crib. In spite of the conditions of his birth, he was calm, pink-cheeked and healthy. The first day that Lydia was up she glanced at him as she passed the door. He gave her somehow the impression of leading a life apart. At first she only used to stare at him from the doorway; then she ventured in, leaned on the crib, offered him a finger to which he clung, invented a game of clapping of hands, and was rewarded by a toothless smile and a long complicated gurgle of delight. The sound was too much for Lydia--the idea that the baby was glad to be starting out on the tortured adventure of living. She went back to her own room in tears, weeping not for her own griefs but because all human beings were so infinitely pathetic. The next day, Anna, the mother, came in while she was bending over the crib. Lydia knew her story, the common one--the story of a respectable, sheltered girl falling suddenly, wildly in love with a handsome boy, and finding, when after a few months he wearied of her, that she had never been his wife--that he was already married. Lydia looked at the neat, blond, spectacled woman beside her. It was hard to imagine her murdering anyone. She seemed gentle, vague, perhaps a little defective. Later in their acquaintance she told Lydia how she had done it. She had not minded his perfidy so much, until he told her that she had known all along they weren't married--that she'd done it with her eyes open--that she had been "out for a good time." He was a paperhanger among other things, and a great pair of shears had been lying on the table. The first thing she knew they were buried in his side. Lydia could not resist asking her whether she regretted what she had done.