“She has just gone into the women’s workroom.  One of the sewing gang is epileptic, and fell in a fit a few minutes ago, so I sent for her.  Come this way and I will find her.”

The visitor hesitated, drew back.

“Is Miss Brentano there also?”

“No.  She is still on the infirmary list.”

Jarvis opened the door of a long, well-lighted but narrow room, in the centre of which was a table extending to the lower end; and on each side of it sat women busily engaged in stitching and binding shoes, and finishing off various articles of clothing; while two were ticketing a pile of red flannel and blue hickory shirts.  Four sewing-machines stood near the wall where grated windows admitted sunshine, and their hymn to Labor was the only sound that broke the brooding silence.  The room was scrupulously clean and tidy, and the inmates, wearing the regulation uniform of blue-striped homespun, appeared comparatively neat; but sordid, sullen, repulsively coarse and brutish were many of the countenances bent over the daily task, and now and then swift, furtive glances from downcast eyes betrayed close kinship with lower animals.

At one of the machines sat a woman whose age could not have exceeded twenty-eight years, with a figure of the Juno type, and a beautiful dark face where tawny chatoyant eyes showed the baleful fire of a leopardess.  Winding a bobbin, she leaned back in her chair, with the indolent, haughty grace of a sultana, and when she held the bobbin up against the light for an instant, her slender olive hand and rounded wrist might have belonged to Cleopatra.

“Who is that woman winding thread?”

“Her name is Iva Le Bougeois, but we call her the ‘Bloody Duchess’.  She was sent up here two years ago, from one of the lower counties, for wholesale butchery.  Seems her husband got a divorce, and was on the eve of marrying again.  She posted herself about the second wedding, and managed to make her way into the parlor, where she hid behind the window curtains.  Just as the couple stood up to be married, she cut her little boy’s throat with a razor, dragged the body in front of the bride, and before any one could move, drew a revolver, blew the top of her husband’s head off, and then shot herself.  The ball passed through her shoulder and broke her arm, but as you see, she was spared, as many another wildcat has been.  Her friends and counsel tried to prove insanity, but the plea was too thin; so she landed here for a term of twenty years, and it will take every day of it to cut her claws.  She is as hard as flint, and her heart is as black as a wolf’s mouth.”

“Medea’s wrongs generally end in Medea’s crimes,” answered the visitor; watching the defiant poise of the small shapely head, covered with crisp, raven locks.  Having less acquaintance with the classics than with the details of prison discipline, the under-warden stared.

After a moment he pointed to a diminutive figure standing at the end of the long table, and engaged in folding some white garments.