"Lunch, is it!" drawled the matron, with her maddening grin. "Sure it's Vassar College, or Bryn Mawr maybe, these swells think they're attendin'! How triggynomtry, an' dead languidges, an' the pianoforty do tire the brain! Wouldn't you find a club sandwich tasty, young ladies? Or a paddy-de-foy-grass, now? Back to your tubs!" Jean took no part in the demonstration, and as the Wilkes girl returned to her work she cursed her for a chicken-hearted coward. Since the day of her rebuff she had worn her enmity like a chip upon her shoulder. Jean met this, as she now met everything, with apathy. Stella, her unlovely associates bending over the steaming tubs, the nagging matron--one and all had their being in an unreal world, a nightmare country, which must be stoically endured until the awakening. The tomboy had become a mystic. With this detachment she incuriously watched the rising storm. From Tuesday to Thursday the unrest spent itself in note-writing, a diversion, following Rabelaisian models in style, which was, of course, forbidden. The contraband pencils found ingenious hiding-places, however, and the notes themselves a lively circulation. One of these missives, written by Stella and mailed with a scuttleful of fresh coal in the laundry stove, fell under Jean's eye Thursday afternoon. It was intended for another, but some delay had bungled its delivery, and the flames unfolded it and betrayed its secret. Stella saw and pressed close. "If you blab, I'll kill you," she threatened hoarsely. "That's straight." Jean shrugged her away. She attached no weight to the scrawl's ungrammatical hints of violence. Such vaporings were as common as they were idle. Nor was she moved when, on Friday, during recreation, the matron's alertness checked, though it failed truly to appraise, a catlike dart of Stella's to the rear. She did not escape, however, a certain sympathetic share in the tension which set the last day of the week apart from other days. The nerves of a reformatory are high-pitched. To be always dumb unless bidden to speak, forever aware of a spying eye, eternally the slave of Yea and Nay--such is the common lot. Double the feeling of repression, and you get the prison and hysteria. From the rising-bell, Saturday, till she slept again, Jean's senses were played upon by vague malign influences. All felt them. If sleeve brushed sleeve, a scowl followed; muttered curses sped the passing of every dish at meals; and in the stifling night some one raised the heart-clutching chant against the matron. This was the time Jean hailed it for her own.