think that!"

"Think what?"

"That what they did was no real harm--that they were unjustly condemned.
There isn't one here who won't tell you that. The worse they are the
more they think it."

Lydia had looked up from her contemplation of the gray rag rug. No
sermon could have stopped her as short as that--the idea that she was
exactly like all the other inmates. She protested, more to herself than
to Evans.

"But it is different! What I did was an accident, not a deliberate
crime."

Evans smiled her old, rare, gentle smile.

"But the law says it was a crime."

Horrible! Horrible but true! Lydia was to find that every woman there
felt exactly as she did; that she was a special case; that she had done
nothing wrong; that her conviction had been brought about by an
incompetent lawyer, a vindictive district attorney, a bribed jury, a
perjured witness. The first thing each of them wanted to explain was
that she--like Lydia--was a special case.

The innocent-looking little girl who had committed bigamy. "Isn't it to
laugh?" said she. "Gee, when you think what men do to us! And I get five
years for not knowing he was dead! And what harm did I do him anyway?"

And the gaunt elderly stenographer who had run an illicit mail-order
business for her employers. One of them had evidently occupied her whole
horizon, taking the place of all law, moral and judicial.

"He said it was positively legal," she kept repeating, believing
evidently that the judge and jury had been pitifully misinformed.

And there was the stout middle-aged woman with sandy hair and a bland
competent manner--she was competent. She had made a specialty of
real-estate frauds.

"I was entirely within the law," she said, as one hardly interested to
argue the matter.

And there were gay young mulatto girls and bright-eyed Italians, who all
said the same thing--"everyone does it; only the other girl squealed on
me"--and there were the egotists, who were never going to get into this
mess again. Some girls had to steal for a living; they had brains enough
to go straight. Even the woman who had attempted to kill her husband
felt she had been absolutely within her rights and after hearing her
story Lydia was inclined to agree with her.

Only Evans seemed to feel that her sentence had been just.

"No, it wasn't right what I did," she said, and she stood out like a
star, superior to her surroundings. She only was learning and growing in
the terrible rou