How be downright
woman?

"What do you mean?" asked the young girl.

So Millie told her. They went to bed, their light was put out, and
neither had a wink of sleep. Rhona lay staring in the darkness and over
the room came the soft whisper of Millie bearing a flood of the filth of
the underworld. Rhona could not resist it. She lay helpless, quaking
with a wild horror.... Later she remembered that night in Russia when
she and others hid under the corn in a barn while the mob searched over
their heads--a moment ghastly with impending mutilation and death--and
she felt that this night was more terrible than that. Her girlhood
seemed torn to shreds.... Dawn broke, a watery glimmer through the high
barred window. Rhona rose from her bed, rushed to the door, pulled on
the bars, and loosed a fearful shriek. The guard, running down, Millie,
leaping forward, both cried:

"What's the matter?"

But the slim figure in the white nightgown fell down on the floor, and
thus earned a few hours in the hospital.

* * * * *

They set her to scrubbing floors next day, a work for which she had
neither experience nor strength. Weary, weary day--the large rhythm of
the scrubbing-brush, the bending of the back, the sloppy, dirty
floors--on and on, minute after minute, on through the endless hours.
She tried to work diligently, though she was dizzy and sick, and felt as
if she were breaking to pieces. Feverishly she kept on. Lunch was
tasteless to her; so was supper; and after supper came Millie.

No one can tell of those nights when the young girl was locked in with a
hard prostitute--nights, true, of lessening horror, and so, all the more
horrible. As Rhona came to realize that she was growing accustomed to
Millie's talk--even to the point of laughing at the jokes--she was
aghast at the dark spaces beneath her and within her. She was becoming a
different sort of being--she looked back on the hard-toiling girl, who
worked so faithfully, who tried to study, who had a quiet home, whose
day was an innocent routine of toil and meals and talk and sleep, as on
some one who was beautiful and lovely, but now dead. In her place was a
sharp, cynical young woman. Well for Rhona that her sentence was but
five days!

The next afternoon she was scrubbing down the long corridor between the
cells when the matron came, jangling her keys.

"Some one here for you," said the matron.

Rhona leaped up.

"My mother?" she c