tine. It soon began to seem to Lydia that this little
fool of a maid of hers was a great person. Why?

Locked in her cell from dark to daylight, Lydia spent much of the time
in thinking. Like a great many people in this world, she had never
thought before. She had particularly arranged her life so she should not
think. Most people who think they think really dream. Lydia was no
dreamer. She lacked the romantic imagination that makes dreams magical.
Clear-sighted and pessimistic when she looked at life, the reality had
seemed hideous, and she looked away as quickly as possible, looked back
to the material beauty with which she had surrounded herself and the
pleasant activities always within reach. Now, cut off from pleasure and
beauty, it seemed to her for the first time as if there were a real
adventure in having the courage to examine the whole scheme of life. Its
pattern could hardly be more hideous than that of every day.

What was she? What reason had she for living? What use could life be put
to? What was the truth?

A verse she could not place kept running through her head:

_Quand j'ai connu la Verite,
J'ai cru que c'etait une amie;
Quand je l'ai comprise et sentie,
J'en etais deja degoute._

_Et pourtant elle est eternelle,
Et ceux qui se sont passes d'elle
Ici-bas ont tout ignore._

She had been deliberately ignorant of much of life--of everything.

She went through a period of despair, all the worse because, like a face
in a nightmare, it was featureless. It was despair, not over the fact
that she was in prison but over the whole scheme of the universe, the
futile hordes of human beings living and hoping and failing and passing
away.

Despair paralyzed her bodily activities. Her mind, even her giant will,
failed her. She could neither sleep nor eat, and after a week of it was
taken to the hospital. The rumor ran through the prison that she was
going mad--that was the way it always began. She lay in the hospital two
days, hardly moving. Her face seemed to have shrunk and her eyes to have
grown large and fiery. The doctor came and talked to her. She would not
answer him; she would not meet his gaze; she would do nothing but draw
long unnatural breaths like sighs.

In the room next to her there was a mother with a six-months-old baby.
Lydia at the best of times had never been much interested in babies,
though all young animals made a certain appeal to her. Her friends