"Oh, Evans!" was Lydia's greeting, very much in her old manner.
"You'd better call me Louisa here—I mean, it's first names we use," said Evans.
The fact had already been called to her former employer's attention by Muriel, who had done nothing but call her Lydia in a futile effort to be friendly. She steeled herself to hear it from Evans, who, however, managed to avoid it. She gossiped of the prison news, and tried to cheer and help this newcomer with whatever wisdom she had acquired. Lydia neither moved nor answered nor again looked up.
"As the matron says," Evans ran on, "the worst is over when you get here. It's the trial and the sentence and the journey that's worst. After a week or so you'll begin to get used to it."
Lydia's nostrils trembled.
"I shall never get used to it," she said. "I don't belong here. What I did was no crime."
There was a short pause. Lydia waited for Evans' cordial agreement to what seemed a self-evident assertion. None came. Instead she said gently, as she might have explained to a child, "Oh, miss, they all 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.