and then
took his miserable departure. He got back to New York late that night,
and the next day he resigned his position as district attorney.

Eleanor read of his resignation first in the local paper, and came to
his mother for an explanation; but Mrs. O'Bannon was as much surprised
as anyone. Without acknowledging it, both women were frightened at the
prospect of O'Bannon's attempting, without backing, to build up a law
practice in New York. Both dreaded the effect upon him of failure. Both
would have advised against his resigning his position. Perhaps for this
very reason neither had been consulted.

The two women who loved him parted with specious expressions of
confidence. Doubtless Dan would make a great success of it, they said.
He was brilliant, and worked so hard.

CHAPTER XV

In the spring Lydia was transferred from the kitchen to the long, bright
workroom. Here the women prisoners hemmed the blankets woven in the
men's prison. Here they themselves wove the rag rugs for the floors,
made up the house linen and their own clothes--Joseph's too--not only
their prison clothes, but the complete outfit with which each prisoner
was dismissed.

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 o