Archie marched to the cell-house, where, inside the brick shell, the cells rose, four tiers of them. The door locked on Archie, and he looked about the bare cell where he was to spend a year. For an hour, certain small privileges were allowed; favored convicts, in league with officials, peddled pies and small fruits at enormous commissions; somewhere a prisoner scraped a doleful fiddle. Near by, a guard haggled with a convict who worked in the cigar shop and stole cigars for the guard to sell on the outside. The guard, it seemed, had recently raised his commission from fifty to sixty per cent., and the convict complained. But when the guard threatened to report him for his theft, the convict gave in.
At seven o'clock the music ceased, and hall permits expired. Then there was another hour of the lights, when some of the convicts read. Then, at eight, it grew suddenly dark and still. Presently Archie heard the snores of tired men. He could not sleep himself; his pallet of straw was alive with vermin; the stillness in the great cell-house was awful and oppressive; once in a while he heard some one, somewhere, from a near-by cell, sigh heavily. Now, he thought, he was doing his bit at last; "buried," the guns called it. Finally, when the hope had all gone from his heart, he fell asleep.
The summer night fell, and the prison's gray wall merged itself in the blackness; but it still shut off the great world outside from the little world inside. The guards came out and paced the walls with their rifles, halting now and then with their backs to the black forms of the cell-houses, and looked out over the city, where the electric lights blazed.
XII
Elizabeth had gone abroad feeling that she might escape the dissatisfaction that possessed her. This dissatisfaction was so very indefinite that she could not dignify it as a positive trouble, but she took it with her over Europe wherever she went, and she finally decided that it would give her no peace until she took it home again. She could not discuss it with her mother, for Mrs. Ward was impatient of discussion. She could do no more than feel Elizabeth's dissatisfaction, and she complained of it both abroad and at home. She told her husband and her son that Elizabeth had practically ruined their trip, that Elizabeth hadn't enjoyed it herself, nor allowed her to enjoy it. Elizabeth, however, if unable to realize the sensations she had anticipated in their travels, gave her mother unexpected compensation by recalling and vivifying for her after they had returned in the fall, all their foreign experiences, so that they enjoyed them in retrospect. Ward, indeed, said that Elizabeth had seen everything there was to see in Europe. He only laughed when Elizabeth declared that, now she was at home again, she intended to do something; just what, she could not determine.
"Perhaps I'll become a stenographer or a trained nurse."
"The idea!" exclaimed Mrs. Ward. "To talk like that! You should pay more attention to your social duties."
"Why?" demanded Elizabeth, looking at her mother with clear, sober eyes.
Mrs. Ward, in her habitual avoidance of reasons, could not think of one instantly.
"You owe it to your station," she declared presently, and then, as if this were, after all, a reason, she added, "that's why."