"I expect I'll get out of it—crying, I mean—now I'm back."
"Don't let it worry you, old boy—we're pals, you and Len and I. But—but—don't you really like us talking to you about prison?"
He lifted his head quickly.
"It all depends."
"You see, there you were ragging and laughing about your clothes and your hair and all that. So how was I to know you'd mind——"
"But it's different. Oh, I don't suppose you'll understand—but it's different. Having one's clothes fumigated and one's hair cut short is a joke—it's funny, it's a joke, so I laughed. But being obliged to have everything exactly straight—every damned fork in its damned place——" he stopped suddenly and ground his teeth. "It's the little things that are so infernal and degrading; big things one has to make oneself big to tackle, somehow, and it helps. But the little things ... one just cries. Listen, Janey. Once a fortnight they used to come and search us in our cells. We used to stand there just in our vests and drawers, and they'd pass their hands over us. Well, I could stand that, for it was horrible—sickening and monstrous and horrible. But when you were punished just because your tins weren't in the exact mathematical space allotted to them—it wasn't horrible or monstrous at all, just childish and silly; and when a dozen childish and silly things crowd into your day, why, you become childish and silly yourself, that's all. What I can't forgive prison isn't that it's made me hard or wicked or wretched, but that it's made me childish and silly—so if I deserved hanging when I went in, I'm hardly worth spanking now I've come out."
"What I can't forgive prison is the miserable ideas you've picked up in it."
"There aren't any ideas in prison—only habits."
He hid his face for a minute in the coverlet. Janet's hand crept over his hair.
"You'll soon be happy again, old boy," she whispered.