Manslaughter by Alice Duer Miller

The next morning at the regular prison hour Lydia woke with a start. She had been aware for some time of a strange unaccountable roaring in her ears. She looked about her, surprised to see that the light of dawn was not falling through a tall barred aperture at the head of her bed, but was coming across a wide carpeted room from two chintz-curtained windows. Then she remembered she was at home; the roaring was the habitual sound of a great city; the room was the room she had had since she was a child. It seemed less familiar to her, less homelike, than her cell. She put out her hand to the satin coverlet and the sheets, softer than satin. The physical sensation of the contact was delicious, and yet there was something sad about it too. It was the thought of her late companions that made her sad, as if she had deserted them in trouble.

It would be two hours or more before Eleanor and Benny would be awake. She flung her arms above her head and lay back, thinking. She mustn't let them cherish her as if she were a wounded, stricken creature. She was more to be envied now than in the old fighting days, when all her inner life had been a sort of poisoned turmoil. No one had pitied her then.