se set in authority over her could
only be won at a cost against which her every maidenly instinct
revolted. So, she went through the inferno of days and nights in a
dreariness of suffering that was deadly. Naturally, the life there was
altogether an evil thing. There was the material ill ever present in
the round of wearisome physical toil, the coarse, distasteful food, the
hard, narrow couch, the constant, gnawing irksomeness of imprisonment,
away from light and air, away from all that makes life worth while.

Yet, these afflictions were not the worst injuries to mar the girl
convict's life. That which bore upon her most weightily and incessantly
was the degradation of this environment from which there was never any
respite, the viciousness of this spot wherein she had been cast through
no fault of her own. Vileness was everywhere, visibly in the faces of
many, and it was brimming from the souls of more, subtly hideous. The
girl held herself rigidly from any personal intimacy with her fellows.
To some extent, at least, she could separate herself from their
corruption in the matter of personal association. But, ever present,
there was a secret energy of vice that could not be escaped so
simply--nor, indeed, by any device; that breathed in the spiritual
atmosphere itself of the place. Always, this mysterious, invisible, yet
horribly potent, power of sin was like a miasma throughout the prison.
Always, it was striving to reach her soul, to make her of its own. She
fought the insidious, fetid force as best she might. She was not evil
by nature. She had been well grounded in principles of righteousness.
Nevertheless, though she maintained the integrity of her character,
that character suffered from the taint. There developed over the girl's
original sensibility a shell of hardness, which in time would surely
come to make her less scrupulous in her reckoning of right and wrong.

Yet, as a rule, character remains the same throughout life as to its
prime essentials, and, in this case, Mary Turner at the end of her term
was vitally almost as wholesome as on the day when she began the serving
of the sentence. The change wrought in her was chiefly of an external
sort. The kindliness of her heart and her desire for the seemly joys of
life were unweakened. But over the better qualities of her nature
was now spread a crust of worldly hardness, a denial of appeal to her
sensibilities. It was this that would eventually bring her peri