It was dark when they reached the station, so dark that she could not get a definite idea of anything but the great wall of the prison, and the clang of the unbarring of the great gate. Later she came to know the doorway with its incongruous beauty—the white door with its fanlight and side windows, and two low stairways curving up to it, and, above, the ironwork porch, supported on square ironwork columns of a leaf pattern, suggestive somehow of an old wistaria vine. But now she knew nothing between the gate and the opening of the front door.
She entered what might have been the wide hall of an old-fashioned and extraordinarily bare country house. A wide stairway rose straight before her, and wide, old-fashioned doors opened formally to left and right.
She was taken into the room at the right—the matron's room. While her name and age and crime were being registered she stood staring straight before her where bookshelves ran to the ceiling. She could recognise familiar bindings—the works of Marion Crawford and Mrs. Humphry Ward.
Calm brown-eyed women seemed to surround her, but she would not even look at them. Their impersonal kindness seemed to be founded on the insulting knowledge of her utter helplessness. They chatted a little with the guard who had brought her. Was the train late? Well, not as bad as last time.
She wondered how soon they would cut her hair.
After a little while she was taken through a long corridor directly to a spacious bathroom. Her clothes, wrapped in a sheet, were borne away. At this Lydia gave a short laugh. It pleased her as a sign that the routine in her case was palpably ridiculous—to take away her things as if they were infected. She was given a bath, a nightgown of most unfriendly texture was handed to her, and presently she was locked in her cell—still in possession of her hair.
She felt like an animal in a trap—could imagine herself running along the floor smelling at cracks for some hope of escape, with that strange head motion, up and down, up and down, of a newly caged animal.
More even than the locks and bolts, she minded the open grille in the door, like an eye through which she might at any moment of the day or night be spied upon. At every footstep she prepared herself to meet with a defiant stare the eyes of an inspector. The cell was hardly a cell, but a room larger than most hall bedrooms. The bed had a white cover; so had the table; and the window, though barred, was large. But this made no impression on Lydia. She was conscious of being locked in. Only her pride and her hard common sense kept her from beating at the door with her bare hands and making one of those screaming outbreaks so familiar to prison officials.
She who had never been coerced was now to be coerced in every action, surrounded everywhere by symbols of coercion. She who had been so intense an individualist that she had discarded a French model if she saw other women wearing it was now to wear a striped gingham dress of universal pattern. She whose competent white hands had never done a piece of useful work was sentenced to not less than three or more than seven years of hard labor. What would that be—hard labor? The vision of that giant negro working hopelessly at his loom was before her all night long.
All night long she wandered up and down her cell, now and then laying her hand on the door to assure herself of the incredible fact that it was locked. Only for a few minutes at dawn she fell asleep, forgetting the catastrophe, the malignant fate that had overtaken her, and woke imagining herself at home.