"Of course I'll do it," answered Eleanor. There really was not anything else to say. The next instant Lydia was gone.
Eleanor lay quite still, trying to understand the meaning of the scene. She was often accused by her friends of coldness, of lack of human imagination, of attempting to substitute mental for emotional processes. Aware of a certain amount of justice in these accusations, she tried to atone by putting her reasoning faculty most patiently and gently at work upon the problems of those she loved. Her nature was not capable of really understanding turgidity, but she did better than most people inasmuch as she avoided forming wrong judgments about it. She felt about Lydia now as she had once felt when O'Bannon had described to her his struggle against drinking—wonder that a person so much braver and stronger than she, Eleanor, was, could be content to avoid temptation instead of fighting it.
At breakfast, which the three women had together, Eleanor saw that Lydia had regained her calm of the evening before. While they were still at table Wiley was shown in. He felt obviously a certain constraint, an embarrassment to know what to say, which he concealed under a formal professional manner. Lydia put a stop to this simply enough by getting up and putting her arms round his neck.
"I've thought so much of all you've been doing for me since I was a child," she said.
He was associated in her mind with her father. Wiley felt his eyelids stinging.
"Why, my dear child, my dear child!" he said. And he held her off to look at her as if uncertain that it was the same girl. "Well, I must say prison doesn't seem to have done you much harm."
"It's done me good, I hope," said Lydia.
She made him sit down and drink an extra cup of coffee. There was something quite like a festival in the comradeship that developed among the four of them. She began to question her visitor about the method of getting a pardon for Evans. He advised her to go and see Mrs. Galton. At the name she and Benny glanced at each other and smiled. They were both thinking of the day when Lydia had so resented the presence of the old lady in her house.
She went to Mrs. Galton's office that same morning. It occupied the second floor of an old building that looked out over Union Square. Lydia had not thought of making an appointment, and when she reached the outer office she was told that Mrs. Galton was engaged—would be engaged for some time—a member of the parole board was in conference. Would Miss Thorne wait?
Yes, Lydia would wait. She sat down on a hard bench and watched the work of the society go on before her eyes. She had some knowledge of business and finance, and she knew very soon that she was in the presence of an efficient organization; but it was not only the efficiency that charmed her—it was partly the mere business routine, which made her feel like coming home after she had been at sea. The clear impersonal purpose of it all promised forgetfulness of self. At the end of half an hour of waiting she was possessed with the desire to become part of this work. Here was the solution of her problem. When at last she was shown into Mrs. Galton's bleak little office—not half the size of Lydia's cell—her first words were not of Evans, after all.