"You'll make Mr. Weston find Howard?" Laura said, in a frantic whisper, as they walked across the courtyard to the little jail back of the station-house. "Oh, I was going to meet him,—and I am here!"
Fred shrugged her shoulders: "Why did you come, if you mind it so? (Married women are awfully poor sports," she thought.)
"Do you think I'd funk and leave you?" Laura retorted; and Fred's face softened.
"Howard will be so upset—" Laura said, quivering.
"Nonsense! He'll see the fun of it," Fred assured her. In matters of this kind, she understood Howard better than little Lolly ever could....
Her face was glowing with excitement! This meant something to the Cause! An old phrase ran through her mind, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed,"—"I tell you what, Laura," she said, under her breath, "this ridiculous business is the seed of a big thing; it has given me a great idea: let women refuse to obey the laws, until they are allowed to make them!"
"This way," said the officer, and herded them into the receiving-room of the House of Detention. The next few minutes stung even Fred's aplomb—they were searched! The indignity of hands passing down her figure—hands not rough, not unkind, not insulting, merely mechanical,—made her unreasonably, but quite furiously, angry. Laura was a little shocked, but her dignity was simple and unshaken. Catalina, her dirty, streaky face puffed with crying, laughed loudly with amusement.
"This is abominable!" Fred said, her voice shaking. The matron, making notes on a pad, paid no attention to the protest. It was all in the day's work—human wreckage washed up out of the gutter, rose in this bleak, stone-lined room every day; rose, flooded into the surrounding cells, where it vociferated, wept, pleaded, stood rigid with fury and shame, or else collapsed into sodden slumber. Then, by and by, it ebbed away. And the next day, and the next, the same drift and ruin of humanity flooded in and drifted out.
After further telephoning had been promised by the matron, the three girls were placed in a cell. Catalina at once flung herself full length on the bench that ran along two sides of it; Fred sat down and took out her note-book. "I mustn't forget one incident," she told herself. The experience had penetrated below the theatrical consciousness of martyrdom, and roused a primitive anger, not for herself, or the other two (of whom, to tell the truth, she thought very little), but against the wastefulness of a system which permitted this wreckage to sweep in and sweep out—unchecked, unchanged, over and over. She saw, as she had never seen before, the righteousness of woman's demand that she should have a hand in the making and the administering of Law. She was impressed, not so much by the injustice of leaving the punishment of women to men, as by the irrationality of it.
"There ought to have been a woman in that station-house," she said; "and there ought to be women police officers and judges. Just wait till we get the vote, Laura—we'll stop this idiocy! That's what it is: idiocy, not justice."