Prisoners whose conduct was good enough to keep them in the first grade were allowed to see visitors once a week. Miss Bennett came regularly, and Eleanor had come more than once. Lydia was very eager to see these two, but was not eager to see anyone else. There was always a terrible moment of shyness with newcomers—an awkward ugly moment. She did not wish to see anyone who did not love her in a simple human way that swept away restraint.
She did not want to see Albee, and she was equally sure he did not want to see her but had been driven by the politician's fear of leaving behind him in his course onward and upward any smoldering fires of hatred which a little easy kindness might quench. As a matter of fact, she did not hate Albee—nor like him. She simply recognized him as a useful person whom all her life she would go on using. This coming interview must serve to attach him to her, so that if in the future she needed a powerful politician to help her destroy O'Bannon she would have one ready to her hand. She knew exactly and instinctively how to manage Albee—not by being appealing and friendly. If she were nice to him he would go away feeling that that chapter in his life was satisfactorily closed. But if she were hostile, if she made him uncomfortable, he would work to win back her friendship. Prisoner as she was, she would be his master. She arranged herself, expression and spirit alike, to meet him sternly.
She did not stop to consider the impression she might make on her visitor—in her striped dress and her prison shoes. It was never Lydia's habit to think first of the impression she was making.
She was brought to the matron's room, and then crossing the hall she entered the bare reception room, with its chill, white mantelpiece, the fireplace blocked by a sheet of metal, its empty center table and stiff straight-backed chairs. She entered without any anticipation of what was in store for her, and saw a tall figure just turning from the window. It was O'Bannon. She had just a blurred vision of his gray eyes and the hollows in his cheeks. Then her wrists and knees seemed to melt, her heart turned over within her; everything grew yellow, green and black, and she fainted—falling gently full length at the feet of the district attorney.
When she came to she was in her own cell. She turned her head slowly to right and left.
"Where is that man?" she said. She was told he had gone.
Of course he had gone—gone without waiting for her recovery, without speaking to anyone else. There was the proof that he was vindictive; that he had come to humiliate her, to feast his eyes on her distress. He had hardly dared hope that she would faint at his feet. There was real cruelty for you, she thought—to ruin a woman's life and then to come and enjoy the spectacle. What a story for him to go home with, to remember and smile over, to tell, perhaps, to his mother or Eleanor!
"The poor girl!" he might say with tones of false pity in his voice. "At the mere sight of me she fainted dead away and lay at my feet in her prison dress, her hands coarsened by hard work——"
This last proof of her utter defenselessness infuriated her. She was justified in her revenge, whatever it might be. The thought of it ran through all her dreams like a secret romance.
It began to take shape in her mind as political ruin. She knew from Eleanor that he had ambitions. He had taken the district attorneyship with the intention of making it lead to higher political office. She had fancies of defeating him in a campaign, using all the tragedy of her own experience to rouse the emotions of audiences. Easier to destroy him within his own party by Albee's help—easier, but not so spectacular. He might not know who had done it unless she went to him and explained. Over that interview her mind often lingered.