In the room next to her there was a mother with a six-months-old baby. Lydia at the best of times had never been much interested in babies, though all young animals made a certain appeal to her. Her friends' babies, swaddled and guarded by nurses, lacked the spontaneous charm of a kitten or a puppy. This baby, however—Joseph his name was, and he was always so referred to—was different. He spent a great deal of time alone, sitting erect in his white iron crib. In spite of the conditions of his birth, he was calm, pink-cheeked and healthy. The first day that Lydia was up she glanced at him as she passed the door. He gave her somehow the impression of leading a life apart. At first she only used to stare at him from the doorway; then she ventured in, leaned on the crib, offered him a finger to which he clung, invented a game of clapping of hands, and was rewarded by a toothless smile and a long complicated gurgle of delight.
The sound was too much for Lydia—the idea that the baby was glad to be starting out on the tortured adventure of living. She went back to her own room in tears, weeping not for her own griefs but because all human beings were so infinitely pathetic.
The next day, Anna, the mother, came in while she was bending over the crib. Lydia knew her story, the common one—the story of a respectable, sheltered girl falling suddenly, wildly in love with a handsome boy, and finding, when after a few months he wearied of her, that she had never been his wife—that he was already married.
Lydia looked at the neat, blond, spectacled woman beside her. It was hard to imagine her murdering anyone. She seemed gentle, vague, perhaps a little defective. Later in their acquaintance she told Lydia how she had done it. She had not minded his perfidy so much, until he told her that she had known all along they weren't married—that she'd done it with her eyes open—that she had been "out for a good time." He was a paperhanger among other things, and a great pair of shears had been lying on the table. The first thing she knew they were buried in his side.
Lydia could not resist asking her whether she regretted what she had done.
The girl considered. "I think it was right for him to die," she said, but she was sorry about Joseph. In a little while the baby would be taken from her and put into a state institution. She was maternal—primitively maternal—and her real punishment was not imprisonment but separation from her child. Lydia saw this without entirely understanding it.
The girl had said to her: "I suppose you can't imagine killing anyone?"
Lydia assured her that she could—oh, very easily. She went back to her room thinking that she was more a murderess at heart than this girl, who was now nothing but a mother.
When she came out of the hospital she was not put back at the schoolroom work but was sent to the kitchen. This was an immense tiled room which gave the impression to those who first entered it of being entirely empty. Then the eye fell on a row of copper containers—three of them as tall as she—one for tea, one for coffee, one for hot water, and three smaller pots, round like witches' caldrons, for the cooking of cereals and meats and potatoes. The baking was done in an adjacent alcove. There Lydia was put to work. Gradually the process began to interest her—the mixing of the dough and the baking of dozens of loaves at a time in a great oven with rotating shelves in it. The oven, like all ovens, had its caprices, dependent upon the amount of heat being used by the rest of the institution. Lydia set herself to master the subject. A certain strain of practical competence in her had never before had its expression.