Lydia was incredibly awkward with the needle. It surprised the tall, thin assistant in charge of the workroom that anyone who had had what she described as advantages could be so grossly ignorant of the art of sewing. Lydia hardly knew on which finger to put her thimble and tied a knot in her thread like a man tying a rope. But it was her very inability that first woke her interest, her will. She did not like to be stupider than anyone else. Suddenly one day her little jaw set and she decided to learn how to sew. From that moment she began to adjust herself to prison life. Lydia wondered, considering prisoners in the first grade are allowed to receive visits from their families once a week, and from others, with the approval of the warden, once a month, at the small number of visitors who came to the prison. Were all these women cast off by their families? Evans explained the matter to her, and Lydia felt ashamed that she had needed an explanation. "It takes a man a week's salary--at a good job, too--from New York here and back." Lydia did what was rare of her--she colored. For the first time in her life she felt ashamed, not so much of the privileges of money but of the ease with which she had always taken them. It came over her that this was one of the objects for which Mrs. Galton had once asked a subscription. A memory rose of the way in which in old days she used to dispose of her morning's mail when it came in on her flowered breakfast tray. Advertisements and financial appeals from unknown sources were twisted together by her vigorous fingers and tossed into the waste-paper basket. Mrs. Galton's might well have been among these. She was horrified on looking back at her own lack of humanity. She might have guessed without going through the experience that prison life needed some alleviation. It meant a great deal to her to see Benny every week. Benny stood in the place of her family. She longed to hear of the outside world and her old friends. But she did not crave these visits with such passion as the imprisoned mothers craved a sight of their children. Thought leading quickly to action in Lydia, she arranged through Miss Bennett, allowing it to be supposed to be Miss Bennett's enterprise, to finance the visits of families to the prison. Everyone rejoiced, as if it were a common benefit, over the visit of Muriel's mother and the beautiful auburn-haired daughter of the middle-aged real-estate operator. Lydia felt as if she had been outside the human race all her life and had just been initiated into it. She said something like this to Evans. "Oh, Louisa, rich people don't know anything, do they?" Evans tried to console her. "If they want to they always can."