bjects 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."

It was true, Lydia thought; she had not wanted to know. She had not
wanted anything but her own way, irrespective of anyone else's. That was
being criminal--to want your own way too much. That was all that these
people about her had wanted--these forgers and defrauders--their own
way, their own way. Though she still held her belief that the killing of
Drummond had been an accident, she saw that the bribing of him had been
wrong--the same streak in her, the same determination to have her own
way. She thought of her father and all their early struggles, and how
when she had believed that she was triumphing most over him she had been
at her worst.

Her poor father! It was from him she had inherited her will, but he had
learned in life, as she was now learning in prison, that the strongest
will is the will that knows how to bend.

She thought a great deal about her father. He must have been terribly
lonely sometimes. She had never given him anything in the way of
affection. She had not really loved