They were grim years, those three during which Mary Turner served her sentence in Burnsing.There was no time off for good behavior.The girl learned soon that the favor of those 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 perilously close to contented companioning with crime.
The best evidence of the fact that Mary Turner's soul was not fatally soiled must be found in the fact that still, at the expiration of her sentence, she was fully resolved to live straight, as the saying is which she had quoted to Gilder.This, too, in the face of sure knowledge as to the difficulties that would beset the effort, and in the face of the temptations offered to follow an easier path.
There was, for example, Aggie Lynch, a fellow convict, with whom she had a slight degree of acquaintance, nothing more.This young woman, a criminal by training, offered allurements of illegitimate employment in the outer world when they should be free.Mary endured the companionship with this prisoner because a sixth sense proclaimed the fact that here was one unmoral, rather than immoral--and the difference is mighty.For that reason, Aggie Lynch was not actively offensive, as were most of the others.She was a dainty little blonde, with a baby face, in which were set two light-blue eyes, of a sort to widen often in demure wonder over most things in a surprising and naughty world.
She had been convicted of blackmail, and she made no pretense even of innocence.Instead, she was inclined to boast over her ability to bamboozle men at her will.She was a natural actress of the ingenue role, and in that pose she could unfailingly beguile the heart of the wisest of worldly men.
Perhaps, the very keen student of physiognomy might have discovered grounds for suspecting her demureness by reason of the thick, level brows that cast a shadow on the bland innocence of her face.For the rest, she possessed a knack of rather harmless perversity, a fair smattering of grammar and spelling, and a lively sense of humor within her own limitations, with a particularly small intelligence in other directions.Her one art was histrionics of the kind that made an individual appeal.In such, she was inimitable.She had been reared in a criminal family, which must excuse much.Long ago, she had lost track of her father; her mother she had never known.Her one relation was a brother of high standing as a pickpocket.One principal reason of her success in leading on men to make fools of themselves over her, to their everlasting regret afterward, lay in the fact that, in spite of all the gross irregularities of her life, she remained chaste.She deserved no credit for such restraint, since it was a matter purely of temperament, not of resolve.
The girl saw in Mary Turner the possibilities of a ladylike personality that might mean much financial profit in the devious ways of which she was a mistress.With the frankness characteristic of her, she proceeded to paint glowing pictures of a future shared to the undoing of ardent and fatuous swains.
