The matron was reading aloud from a novel which her audience found
absorbing. Jean could give it no heed. What were the imaginary woes of
Oliver Twist beside her actualities!
The hands of a bland-faced clock crept round to bedtime. The reader
marked her place, and, after a moment's pause, began the first line
of a familiar hymn. Jean hated hymn-singing out of church. It had
depressed her even as a child, while later it evoked choking memories
of her father's funeral. So she set her teeth till they made an end of
it.
Suggestive also of her father and of vesper services to which they
had sometimes gone together, after a Sunday in the fields, were the
words presently repeated by the forlorn figures kneeling about her;
but she heard them with mute lips and in passionate protest against
their personal application. These tawdry creatures might confess that
they had erred and strayed like lost sheep, if they would. She was
not of their flock. The things she had left undone did not prick her
conscience. The things which she ought not to have done were dwarfed to
peccadillos by the vast disproportion of their punishment.