"Know anything about children?" he asked.
Yetta was too much surprised by the question to answer.
"Well," he said, "you don't look like you'd cut their throats. My wife needs a nurse. Come on."
"Ain't you got any clothes that fits her?" he asked the matron at the door. "Clean ones. Don't want things like that in the house. Wash her up. We don't want bugs. And send her over right away."
"Gee," the matron said with sudden, cringing respect. "Why didn't you tell me you had a pull?"
So Yetta was taken out of the Inferno, before her tired senses had fully waked up to its horrors. The warden's house was outside the prison. It had a pleasant lawn, close-clipped, its flower beds well tended, for the labor of the "trusties" was free. There was already a nurse for the children, and Yetta did not have anything to do. The yesterday's storm had been the end of winter, and an almost midsummer heat had fallen on New York. She spent most of her time on a rustic bench under a great elm. There was a fine open view across the busy river to the busier city.
The real nurse was snobbish and would not speak to her, which saved her from much foolish chatter. Nobody paid any attention to her except the warden's three-year-old boy, who continually escaped from his nurse and tried to climb into Yetta's lap. They gave her good meals and a comfortable bed. It was somewhat unkind of them to jerk the baby out of Yetta's lap whenever he found his way there. But otherwise she was very well treated. The only restrictions they put on her was that she should not leave the lawn and should not read the papers. "It would give her a swelled head," the warden said. His prohibition had the advantage of keeping her from the excitement of contact with the strike.
Above everything else, Yetta needed rest and quiet to think. The first day she dozed. The second day her mind woke up. She had a fear that she would forget something. So many things had happened in the past month. Ten days seemed to her a limitless time, so she began at the beginning. Her earliest recollections were of the dingy little book-store and her father. The morning passed in rearranging her memories of him. When they called her for supper, she had reached, in the review of her life, Rachel's first dance. Afterwards she sat in the little dormer window of her bedroom and looked out at the twilight falling over the city; she watched the lights on the river and the stars in their courses overhead and went over her acquaintance with Harry Klein.
She had learned a great deal during this month out of the shop. From words dropped here and there, from things she had seen, she had come to a clearer understanding of the thing she had escaped. She had thought she was in love with Harry Klein! She went to sleep realizing how hollow had been her conception of love. The word had a very different content now that she had seen Walter and Mabel together and had heard the gossip of the girls. The thought of two such people being in love seemed very wonderful to her.