a prisoner, Lydia, I mean you shall be liberated. If nature drives you
on as it drives the rest of us to worship something--somebody--blindly,
and he's not worth it, you bet your life I'll save you."

She leaned back against the step above, her face suddenly sick and
miserable. What if she didn't want to be saved? the sick face asked him.
Lydia was a truth-teller. She loved Jeff, and she plainly owned it to
herself and felt surprisingly at ease over it. She was born to the
dictates of nice tradition, but when that inner warmth told her she
loved Jeff, even though he was bound to Esther, she didn't even hear
tradition, if it spoke. All she could possibly do for Jeff, who
unconsciously appealed to her every instant he looked at her with that
deep frown between his brows, seemed little indeed. Should she say she
loved him? That would be easy. But were his generalities about life
strong enough to push her and her humilities aside? That was hard to
bear.

"And," he was saying, "once we know we're prisoners, We can be free."

"How?" said Lydia hopefully. "Can we do the things we like?"

"No, by God! there's only one way of getting free, and that's by putting
yourself under the law."

Lydia's heart fell beyond plummet's sounding. She did not want to put
herself under any stricter law than that of heart's devotion. She had
been listening to it a great deal, of late. They were sweet things it
told her, and not wicked things, she thought, but all of humble service
and unasked rewards.

Jeff was roaming on, beguiled by his new thoughts and the sound of his
own voice.

"It's perfectly true what I used to write in that beggarly prison paper.
The only way to be really free is to be bound--by law. It's the big
paradox. Do you know what I'm going to do?"

She shook her head. He was probably, her apprehensive look said, going
to do something that would take him out of the pretty paradise where she
longed to set him galloping on the road to things men ought to have.

"I am going in to tear up the stuff I'm writing about that man I knew
there in the prison. What does God Almighty care about him? I'm going to
write a book and call it 'Prisoners,' and show how I was a prisoner
myself, to money, and luxury, and the game and--" he would not mention
Esther, but Lydia knew where his mind stumbled over the thought of
her--"and how I got my medicine. And how other fellows will have to take
theirs, these fellows Weedie's gulling and Ad