Jean melted before her friendliness.
"I wish I could be under you," she said impulsively. "This place wouldn't seem—what it is."
She framed this wish anew when she faced the matron herself in the bleak cleanliness of the hall. This person was a variant of the superintendent's impersonal type and a slavish plagiarist of her mannerisms. A bundle of prejudices, she believed herself dowered with superhuman impartiality; and now, in muddle-headed pursuit of this notion, she promptly decided that an offender so plainly superior to the average ought in the fitness of things to receive less consideration than the average. Jean accordingly went smarting to her room.
Happily she was given little time to think about it. The incessant round which, day in and day out, was to fill her waking hours, caught her into its mechanism. A querulous bell tapped somewhere, her door, in common with every one in the corridor, was unlocked, and she merged with a uniformed file which, without words, shuffled down two flights of stairs and ranged itself about the tables of a desolate dining-hall. Whereupon the matron, who had taken her station at a small table laid for herself and another black-garbed official, raised her thin voice and repeated,
"The eyes of all wait upon Thee, O Lord!"
An unintelligible mumbling followed, which by dint of strained listening at many ensuing meals Jean finally translated,
"And Thou givest them their meat in due season."
Thirty odd chairs forthwith scraped the bare floor. Thirty odd appetites attacked the food heaped in coarse earthenware upon the oilcloth. Jean fasted. Hash she despised; macaroni stood scarcely higher in her regard; while tea was an essentially feminine beverage which of principle she had long eschewed. This eliminated everything save bread, and it chanced that her share of this staple was of the maiden baking of a young person whose talents till lately had been exclusively devoted to picking pockets.
Jean surveyed the room. It shared the naked dreariness of the corridors; not a picture enlivened its terra-cotta wastes of wall. Another long table, twin in all respects to her own, occupied with hers the greater part of the floor space; but there remained room near the door for two smaller tables, the matron's, which she had remarked on entering, and one occupied by five favorites of fortune, whose uniform, though similar to the general in color, resembled a trained nurse's in its striping, and was further distinguished by white collars and cuffs. This table, like the matron's, was covered with a white cloth and boasted a small jardinière of ferns.
The matron's voice was again heard.