The next day she had herself driven down to Wide Plains, so that she could see Judge Homans. Court was still in session when she got there, and she was shown to the judge's little book-lined room and left to wait. She had expected her first view of the wide main street, of Mr. Wooley's shop, of the columned courthouse to be intensely painful to her, but it wasn't. The tall attendant who ushered her in greeted her warmly. She remembered him clearly leaning against the double doors of the court room to prevent anyone leaving during the judge's charge.
Presently the judge came in, just as he had come in every day to her trial, his hands folded, his robes flowing about him. Lydia rose. Her name apparently had not been given to him, for he looked at her in surprise. Then his face lit up.
"My dear Miss Thorne," he said, "when did you get out?"
It was the first perfectly natural, spontaneous reference to her imprisonment that she had heard since she left prison. It did away with all constraint and awkwardness, to be taken as a matter of course. Criminals were no novelty in the judge's life. He sat down, waved her into a chair opposite, put his elbows on the arms of his swinging chair and locked his knuckles together.
"I'm very glad to see you—very glad indeed," he said.
But he wasn't at all surprised that she had come. It was not unusual, evidently, for the first visit of a released convict to be paid to the judge. He began to question her rather as if she were a child home for the holidays.
"And what did you learn? Baking? Now that's interesting, isn't it? And sewing? Well, well!"
He treated her so simply that Lydia found herself speaking to him with more freedom about the whole experience of prison than she had been able to speak to anyone. The reason was, she thought, that she did not need to explain to him that she was not a tragic exception, a special case. To him she was just one of a long series of lawbreakers.
They talked for an hour. She noted that the judge still enjoyed talking, still insisted on rounding out his sentences; but she felt now no impatience. His reminiscences interested her. Before long she found herself consulting him about a subject that had long preyed on her mind—Alma Wooley. She wanted to do something for Alma Wooley, yet she supposed the girl would utterly reject anything coming from the woman who had——
The judge put his hand on her arm.