Radiantly, vitally young. The great house, with its stillness and
decorum, oppressed her. There was no youth in it, save hers.
She went to her window and looked out. Years ago, like Elinor, she
had watched the penitentiary walls from that window, with their
endlessly pacing sentries, and had grieved for those men who might
look up at the sky, or down at the earth, but never out and across,
to see the spring trees, for instance, or the children playing on
the grass. She remembered the story about Jim Doyle's escape, too.
He had dug a perilous way to freedom. Vaguely she wondered if he
were not again digging a perilous way to freedom.
Men seemed always to be wanting freedom, only they had so many
different ideas of what freedom was. At the camp it had meant
breaking bounds, balking the Military Police, doing forbidden things
generally. Was that, after all, what freedom meant, to do the
forbidden thing? Those people in Russia, for instance, who stole
and burned and appropriated women, in the name of freedom. Were
law and order, then, irreconcilable with freedom?
After she had undressed she rang her bell, and Castle answered it.
"Please find out if Ellen has gone to bed," she said.
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