When her cell door was unlocked she stepped out into the same corridor
along which she had passed the night before. She found it a blaze of
sunlight. Great patches of sunlight fell in barred patterns on the
boards of the floor, scrubbed as white as the deck of a man-of-war.
Remembering the gloomy granite loopholes of her imagination, this sun
seemed insolently bright.

The law compels every prisoner, unless specially exempted, to spend an
hour a day in school. Lydia's examination was satisfactory enough to
exempt her, but she was set to work in the schoolroom, giving out books,
helping with papers, erasing the blackboards, collecting the chalk and
erasers. In this way the whole population of the prison--about
seventy-five women--passed before her in the different grades. She might
have found interest and opportunity, but she was in no humor to be
cooperative.

She sat there despising them all, feeling her own essential
difference--from the bright-eyed Italian girl who had known no English
eighteen months before and was now so industrious a student, to the
large, calm, unbelievably good-tempered teacher. The atmosphere of the
room was not that of a prison school but of a kindergarten. That was
what annoyed Lydia--that these women seemed to like to learn. They
spelled with enthusiasm--these grown women. Up and down pages they
went, spelling "passenger" and "transfer" and "station"--it was
evidently a lesson about a trolley car. Was she, Lydia Thorne, expected
to join joyfully in some such child-like discipline? In mental
arithmetic the competition grew keener. Muriel, a soft-voiced colored
girl, made eight and seven amount to thirteen. The class laughed gayly.
Lydia covered her face with her hands.

"Oh," she thought, "he might better have killed me than this!"

It seemed to her that this terrible impersonal routine was turning on
her like a great wheel and grinding her into the earth. What incredible
perversity it Was that no one--no prisoner, no guard, not even the
clear-eyed matron--would see the obvious fact that she was not a
criminal as these others were.

Had O'Bannon's power reached even into the isolation of prison and
dictated that she should be treated like everyone else--she who was so
different from these uneducated, emotional, unstable beings about her?

It was her former maid, Evans, who destroyed this illusion. The
different wards of the prison ate separately; and as Evans was not in
her ward they