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."
Lydia did what was rare of her--she colored. For the first time in her life she felt ashamed, not so much of the privileges of money but of the ease with which she had always taken them. It came over her that this was one of the objects for which Mrs. Galton had once asked a subscription. 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. Galton's might well have been among these.
She was horrified on looking back at her own lack of humanity. She might have guessed without going through the experience that prison life needed some alleviation. It meant a great deal to her to see Benny every week. Benny stood in the place of her family. She longed to hear of the outside world and her old friends. But she did not crave these visits with such passion as the imprisoned mothers craved a sight of their children.
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?"
It was true, Lydia thought; she had not wanted to know. She had not wanted anything but her own way, irrespective of anyone else's. That was being criminal--to want your own way too much. That was all that these people about her had wanted--these forgers and defrauders--their own way, their own way. Though she still held her belief that the killing of Drummond had been an accident, she saw that the bribing of him had been wrong--the same streak in her, the same determination to have her own way. She thought of her father and all their early struggles, and how when she had believed that she was triumphing most over him she had been at her worst.