"No." Toni spoke very quietly. "I shan't forget it. But I want to know a little more. You think Owen is unhappy because he is married to me. Do you think he would be happier if I went away and left him? Is that what you are too kind, too generous to imply?"
Eva's heart gave a sudden throb. Her first aim in life ever since the prison gates clanged behind her at the end of her term of confinement had been to do some harm in the world, to make up for the injury which she considered had been done to her; and no weak emotions such as pity or generosity could be allowed to hold her back.
To her oddly-perverted mind, it seemed that if she could persuade Toni to leave her husband, to wreck her home and her future, she would have got "her own back" to a considerable degree; and she had a double motive in her hatred of Owen, who, as she well knew, distrusted her personally and disliked her friendship with his young wife.
Any person connected with a big penal settlement will tell you that there is never any certainty as to the moral result of a term of imprisonment on any given prisoner.
To some natures, the punishment may be both a deterrent and an excellent lesson, while to others the educational value may be great and the deterrent effect almost nil; but in one class of prisoner—the class to which Eva Herrick belonged—imprisonment wakes only the worst and basest of all emotions, a desire, perforce stifled during the period of punishment, for revenge.
That she had suffered, on the whole, justly, never weighed for one instant with Eva herself. That she had been guilty of a crime was less than nothing. What did weigh with her was the fact that she had been found out, and forced to undergo a humiliating and degrading punishment; and from the moment when she came to her senses after the swoon which had mercifully cut short the scene in court, Eva Herrick's whole being had been in revolt against a world where such things were allowed to be.
Her whole pleasure, indeed, while in prison, had been found in planning how, in the future, she could render miserable the life of the husband who had not, so she considered, stood by her; and it was a bitter disappointment to her to find that try as she might she could not torture him to the breaking-point.
He met her most poisoned and bitter shafts with a patience which nothing, it seemed, could pierce. When she taunted him, he only smiled; and when she reviled him he left her presence; so that the only way in which she could win any satisfaction was by detailing to him exaggerated accounts of the treatment she had received in prison.
These stories, untrue and impossible as many of them were, made him wince, not knowing indeed how cunning was the invention behind them; and many times when she was more maddening than usual, Herrick schooled himself to patience by reminding himself of the drastic punishments which had apparently been meted out to her.
When at length she found that Jim was impervious to her stings, Eva looked around her for another victim; and found one in the person of Toni Rose.