Alice Duer Miller

“ Thought leading quickly to action in Lydia, she arranged through Miss Bennett, allowing it to be supposed to be Miss Bennett's enterprise, to finance the visits of families to the prison. Everyone rejoiced, as if it were a common benefit, over the visit of Muriel's mother and the beautiful auburn-haired daughter of the middle-aged real-estate operator. Lydia felt as if she had been outside the human race all her life and had just been initiated into it. She said something like this to Evans.
"Oh, Louisa, rich people don't know anything, do they?" ”

“ Bobby soon went away and left the two women together. They went upstairs to Lydia's bedroom, and in their dressing gowns, with chairs drawn to the fire, they talked. They talked with long pauses between them. No one but Eleanor would have allowed those long silences to pass uninterrupted, but she was wise enough to know they were the very essence of companionship.
Though Eleanor asked several questions about the details of prison life, she was too wise to ask anything about the fundamental change which she felt had taken place in Lydia. She did not betray that she felt there was a change. ”

“ And the Piers—had Lydia heard about them? Fanny had fallen in love with the prophet of a new religion and had made all her arrangements to divorce Noel, but before she left him, as a proof of her new powers, she thought she'd cure him of drinking. Well, my dear, she did. And the result was she found she liked a nonalcoholic Noel better than ever—and she chucked the seer. Can you beat it?
Shadows—they did seem like shadows to Lydia. Staring before her, she fell into meditation, remembering Evans and the pale coffee-colored Muriel and the matron—the small, placid-browed matron who knew not fear. ”

“ Everyone who had ever loved her had been able to love through something beautiful in their own natures—in spite of all the unloveliness of hers. She thought not only of the relations she had missed, like the relation to her father, but of friendships she had lost, which she had deliberately broken in the hideous daily struggle to get her own way. ”

“ Miss Bennett, emotionally susceptible to praise, wiped her eyes, and presently went away, leaving Bobby and Lydia alone. She wondered if perhaps that would be the best thing for Lydia to do—to rebuild her life on Bobby's gay but unwavering devotion.
Lydia, leaning her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands, listened while Bobby gossiped over the empty coffee cups. Did Lydia know about this Western coal man that May Swayne was going to marry? Bobby set him before her in an instant—"A round-faced man, Lydia, with $30,000,000, and such a vocabulary! He never thinks; he presumes. ”

“ She had found a new clew to life and wanted to follow it alone. She had interest, intense, vital interest, to give to life and affairs—yes, and even people; but she had not love. Human relationships couldn't make or mar life for her any more. She wanted to work—nothing else.
She paused, and in the pause the dining-room door opened and Eleanor came in. Eleanor had been up at dawn to get a train from the Adirondacks in time to meet Lydia at the station, and of course the train had been late. Would Lydia put her up for the night? ”

“ Lydia wondered, considering prisoners in the first grade are allowed to receive visits from their families once a week, and from others, with the approval of the warden, once a month, at the small number of visitors who came to the prison. Were all these women cast off by their families? Evans explained the matter to her, and Lydia felt ashamed that she had needed an explanation.
"It takes a man a week's salary—at a good job, too—from New York here and back." ”

“ A memory rose of the way in which in old days she used to dispose of her morning's mail when it came in on her flowered breakfast tray. Advertisements and financial appeals from unknown sources were twisted together by her vigorous fingers and tossed into the waste-paper basket. Mrs. ”