The superintendent ransacked her stock of homilies for an adequate response, but nothing suggested itself. Jean Fanshaw's case refused to fit the routine pigeonholes. She could only remind the girl that it lay with herself to decide whether she would serve out her full term. "It is possible to earn your parole in a year and a half, remember," she charged, rising. "Bear that constantly in mind." Jean seemed not to hear. "The shame of it!" she repeated numbly. "The disgrace of it! I shall never live it down." She brooded long at her window when her visitor had gone, her wrongs rankling afresh from their rehearsal. The two weeks' isolation had begun to tell upon the nerves which she had prided herself were of stoic fibre. Human companionship she did not want. She had not welcomed the superintendent's coming, nor the physician's before her; and, if contempt might slay, the drear files of her fellow-inmates which traversed the snow-bound paths below would have withered in their tracks. It was the open she craved, and the daily walks under the close surveillance of a taciturn matron had but whetted her great desire. She had conned the desolate prospect till she felt she knew its every hateful inch. Yonder, at the head of the long quadrangle, was the administration building, whither Miss Blair had taken her precise way. Flanking the court, ran the red brick cottages--each a replica of its unlovely neighbor, offspring all of a single architectural indiscretion--one of which she supposed incuriously would house her in the lost years of her durance. Quite at the end, closing the group, loomed the prison, gaunt, iron-barred, sinister in the gathering dusk. This last structure had come almost to seem a sensate creature, a grotesque, sprawling monster, with half-human lineaments which nightfall blurred and modelled. Now, as she watched, the central door, that formed its mouth, gaped wide and emitted one of the double files of erring femininity which were continually passing and repassing. She knew that there were degrees of badness here, and reasoned that these from the monster's jaws must be the more refractory, but they appeared to her no worse than the others. Indeed, as looks went, they were, on the whole, superior. She felt no pity for them, only measureless disgust--disgust for the brazen and the dispirited alike; all were despicable. Her pity was for herself that she must breathe the common air.