Escape by door or window was out of the question; to attempt to raise an alarm was to invite fresh violence; and gradually grew the certainty that the situation was genuinely as the jailer had described it: that the street was worse than the house, and that Mary was her own prisoner. She found the bottle labeled "Poison," and bit one of the tablets, but she was young and afraid, and she spat the burning crumbs from her mouth. She did not dare to die, and when Rose came again to the room, her captive was too weak to refuse the broth that was fed her, as if she were a sick child, from a spoon. "You're a dear girl, after all," said the mistress, as she administered the grateful food. "You do as I say and you won't never be sorry. All I want is to have you sensible. I'm your friend." Mary said nothing: she was too weak to answer. "And now," Rose pursued, "I'll just give you a drink." And when she had come back, she had not come back alone. The worst of prisons is that in which the door is so cunningly closed upon the inmate that, at last, after the brutality is familiar, the inmate seems originally to have closed it upon herself, and in such a fortress of pain Mary now found herself restrained. The process was simple. It was merely first to wound and then to inure. The descent to hell is not easy; it is red with blood and wet with tears; but hell itself must be endured. It was not for some days that any woman save Rose came to Mary's cell and then, one afternoon, two women followed the grating key. They were alike only as to clothes. Both wore loose negligé garments, but whereas the one was sturdy and German-blonde, with straw-colored hair, round and heavy face, blue eyes and peasant frame--a younger Rose--the other was wiry, compact, her brows low and dark under somber hair, her full cheeks red only in defiance of a swarthy skin, her eyes black and her mouth vermillion. It was this one who, with an accent that a more sophisticated ear than Mary's would have placed along the Seine, was the first to speak. "'Ello!" she laughed, her teeth gleaming between her lips like pomegranate seeds. "We have come to make the call." Without awaiting a reply, she jumped upon the bed, drew her feet beneath her, and produced and lit a cigarette. The German girl moved more slowly to the other side and there elaborately ensconced herself. Mary looked at her visitors without immediately replying. She had not, in fact, the remotest idea of what was the fitting word. But the French girl was unruffled by this silence. She flung her head back upon a white neck and sent a slow column of blue smoke curling toward the ceiling. "My name," she explained, with an odd clipping of her speech, "eet ees Celeste, an' my good frien' here," she continued with an easy gesture of the cigarette, "she ees Fritzie--chust a bar-bar-ous German." Mary looked at her with a gaze large and listless. "An' you' name?" pursued Celeste, "eet ees--what?"