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watched, she put the flower to her lips, and breathed upon it, and the purple of the petals gave a quiver and seemed to glow . . .
    She did that, and I became aware of the dimness of the world that was about her—of the wards, the women in them, the matrons, even my own self. We might have been painted, all of us, from the same poor box of watery tints; and here was a single spot of colour, that seemed to have come upon the canvas by mistake.
    But I didn’t wonder, then, about how a violet might, in that grim-earthed place, have found its way into those pale hands. I only thought, suddenly and horribly, What can her crime have been? Then I remembered the enamel tablet swinging near my head. I let the inspection close, quite noiselessly, and moved to read it.
    There was her prison number and her class, and beneath them her offence: Fraud & Assault . The date of her reception was eleven months ago. The date of her release was for four years hence.
    Four years! Four Millbank years—which must, I think, be terribly slow ones. I meant to move to her gate then, to call her to me and have her story from her; and I would have done it, had there not come at that moment, from further back along the first passage, the sound of Miss Ridley’s voice, and then of her boots, grinding the sand upon the cold flags of the ward. And that made me hesitate. I thought, How would it be, if the matrons were to look at the girl as I had, and find that flower upon her? I was sure they would take it, and I knew I should be sorry if they did. So I stepped to where they would see me, and when they came I said—it was the truth, after all—that I was weary, and had viewed all I cared to view for my first visit. Miss Ridley said only, ‘Just as you wish, ma’am.’ She turned on her heel and took me back along the passage; and as the gate was shut upon me I looked once over my shoulder to the turning of the ward, and felt a curious feeling—half satisfaction, half sharp regret. And I thought: Well, she will still be here, poor creature! when I return next week.
    The matron led me into the tower staircase, and we began our careful, circling descent to the lower, drearier wards—I felt like Dante, following Virgil into Hell. I was passed over first to Miss Manning, then to a warder, and was taken back through Pentagons Two and One; I sent a message in to Mr Shillitoe, and was led out of the inner gate and along that wedge of gravel. The walls of the pentagons seemed to part before me now, but grudgingly. The sun, that was stronger, made the bruise-coloured shadows very dense.
    We walked, the warder and I, and I found myself gazing again at the bleak prison ground, with its bare black earth and its patches of sedge. I said, ‘There are no flowers grown here, warder? No daisies, no—violets?’
    No daisies, no violets, he answered; not even so much as a dandelion clock. They would not grow in Millbank soil, he said. It is too near the Thames, and ‘as good as marshland’.
    I said that I had guessed as much, and thought again about that flower. I wondered if there might be seams between the bricks that make the walls of the women’s building, that a plant like that might thrust its roots through?—I cannot say.
    And, after all, I did not think of it for long. The warder led me to the outer gate, and here the porter found a cab for me; and now, with the wards and the locks and the shadows and reeks of prison life behind me, it was impossible not to feel my own liberty and be grateful for it. I thought that, after all, I had been right to go there; and I was glad that Mr Shillitoe knew nothing of my history. I thought, His knowing nothing, and the women’s knowing nothing, that will keep that history in its place. I imagined them fastening my own past shut, with a strap and a buckle . . .
    I talked with Helen to-night. My brother brought her here, but with three or four of their friends. They were on their way to a theatre, and very brilliantly