“I want to telephone.”

“To who?”

“Mr. Blaine—­Mr. Blaine!”

“West Tenth Street feller?”

“Yes.”

The sergeant winked to the policeman.

“Oh, the matron’ll see to that!  Hey, Officer?”

Rhona felt her arm seized, and then had a sense of being dragged, a feeling of cool, fetid air, a flood of darkness, voices, and then she knew no more.  The matron who was stripping her and searching her had to get cold water and wash her face....

Later Rhona found herself in a narrow cell, sitting in darkness at the edge of a cot.  Through the door came a torrent of high-pitched speech.

“Yer little tough, reform! reform!  What yer mean by such carryings-on?  I know yer record.  Beware of God, little devil....”

On and on it went, and Rhona, dazed, wondered what new terror it foreboded.  But then without warning the talk switched.

“Yer know who I am?”

“Who?” quavered Rhona.

“The matron.”

“Yes?”

“I divorced him, I did.”

“Yes.”

“My husband, I’m telling yer.  Are yer deef?”

Suddenly Rhona rose and rushed to the door.

“I want to send a message.”

“By-and-by,” said the matron, and her rum-reeking breath came full in the girl’s face.  The matron was drunk.

For an hour she confided to Rhona the history of her married life, and each time that Rhona dared cry, “I want to send a message!” she replied, “By-and-by.”

But after an hour was ended, she remembered.

“Message?  Sure!  Fifty cents!”

Rhona clutched the edge of the door.

“Telephone—­I want to telephone!”

“Telephone!” shrieked the matron.  “Do yer think we keep a telephone for the likes of ye?”

“But I haven’t fifty cents—­besides, a message doesn’t cost fifty cents—­”

“Are yer telling me?” the matron snorted.  “Fifty cents!  Come now, hurry,” she wheedled.  “Yer know as yer has it!  Oh, it’s in good time you come!”

Her last words were addressed to some one behind her.  The cell door was quickly opened; Rhona’s arm was seized by John, the policeman, and without words she was marched to the curb and pushed into the patrol wagon with half a dozen others.  The wagon clanged through the cold, dark streets, darting through the icy edge of the wind, and the women huddled together.  Rhona never forgot how that miserable wagonful chattered—­that noise of clicking teeth, the pulse of indrawn sighs, and the shivering of arms and chests.  Closer and closer they drew, as if using one another as shields against the arctic onslaught, a couple of poor women, and four unsightly prostitutes, the scum of the lower Tenderloin.  One woman kept moaning jerkily: 

“Wisht I was dead—­down in my grave.  It’s bitter cold—­”

The horses struck sparks against the pave, the wheels grided, and the wagon-load went west, up the shadowy depths of Sixth Avenue, under the elevated structure, and stopped before Jefferson Market Court.  The women were hustled out and went shuddering through long corridors, until at last they were shoved into a large cell.