Rhona smiled bitterly, and felt the rub of roughened palms against her icy hands.  Then she began to look around, sick with the smell, the sudden nauseous warmth.  She saw the strange rouged faces, the impudent eyes, the showy headgear, flashing out among the obscure faces of poor women, and as she looked a filthy drunk began to rave, rose tottering, and staggered to the door and beat clanging upon it, all the while shrieking: 

“Buy me the dope, boys, buy me the dope!”

Others pulled her back.  Women of the street, sitting together, chewed gum and laughed and talked shrilly, and Rhona could not understand how prisoners could be so care-free.

All the evening she had been dazed, her one clear thought the sending of a message for help.  But now as she sat in the dim, reeking cell, she began to realize what had happened.

Then as it burst upon her that she was innocent, that she had been lied against, that she was helpless, a wild wave of revolt swept her.  She thought she would go insane.  She could have thrown a bomb at that moment.  She understood revolutionists.

This feeling was followed by abject fear.  She was alone ... alone....  Why had she allowed herself to be caught in this trap?  Why had she struck?  Was it not foolhardy to raise a hand against such a mammoth system of iniquity?  Over in Hester Street her poor mother, plying the never-pausing needle, might be growing anxious—­might be sending out to find her.  What new trouble was she bringing to her family?  What new touch of torture was she adding to the hard, sweated life?  And her father—­what, when he came home from the sweatshop so tired that he was ready to fling himself on the bed without undressing, what if she were missing, and he had to go down and search the streets for her?

If only Joe Blaine had been notified!  Could she depend on that Miss Craig, who had melted away at the first approach of peril?  Yet surely there must be help!  Did not the Woman’s League keep a lawyer in the court?  Would he not be ready to defend her?  That was a ray of hope!  She cheered up wonderfully under it.  She began to feel that it was somehow glorious to thus serve the cause she was sworn to serve.  She even had a dim hope—­almost a fear—­that her father had been sent for.  She wanted to see a familiar face, even though she were sure he would upbraid her for bringing disgrace upon the family.

So passed long hours.  Prisoners came in—­prisoners went out.  Laughter rose—­cries—­mutterings; then came a long silence.  Women yawned.  Some snuggled up on the bench, their heads in their neighbors’ laps, and fell fast asleep.  Rhona became wofully tired—­drooped where she sat—­a feeling of exhaustion dragging her down.  The purple-faced woman beside her leaned forward.

“Say, honey, put your head in my lap!”

She did so.  She felt warmth, ease, a drowsy comfort.  She fell fast asleep....

“No!  No!” she cried out, “it was he struck me!”