"But it is different! What I did was an accident, not a deliberate crime."
Evans smiled her old, rare, gentle smile.
"But the law says it was a crime."
Horrible! Horrible but true! Lydia was to find that every woman there felt exactly as she did; that she was a special case; that she had done nothing wrong; that her conviction had been brought about by an incompetent lawyer, a vindictive district attorney, a bribed jury, a perjured witness. The first thing each of them wanted to explain was that she—like Lydia—was a special case.
The innocent-looking little girl who had committed bigamy. "Isn't it to laugh?" said she. "Gee, when you think what men do to us! And I get five years for not knowing he was dead! And what harm did I do him anyway?"
And the gaunt elderly stenographer who had run an illicit mail-order business for her employers. One of them had evidently occupied her whole horizon, taking the place of all law, moral and judicial.
"He said it was positively legal," she kept repeating, believing evidently that the judge and jury had been pitifully misinformed.
And there was the stout middle-aged woman with sandy hair and a bland competent manner—she was competent. She had made a specialty of real-estate frauds.
"I was entirely within the law," she said, as one hardly interested to argue the matter.
And there were gay young mulatto girls and bright-eyed Italians, who all said the same thing—"everyone does it; only the other girl squealed on me"—and there were the egotists, who were never going to get into this mess again. Some girls had to steal for a living; they had brains enough to go straight. Even the woman who had attempted to kill her husband felt she had been absolutely within her rights and after hearing her story Lydia was inclined to agree with her.