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stretching off at an unnatural angle. Where two corridors meet there is a spiral staircase. At the junction of the wards there is a tower, where the matron of each floor has a little chamber of her own.
    All the time we walked there came, from beyond the windows of the cells, the steady tramp , tramp of the women in the prison yards. Now, as we reached the furthest arm of the second ground-floor ward, I heard another ringing of the prison bell, that made the marching rhythm slow, then grow uneven; and after a moment there came the banging of a door, the rattling of bars, and then the sound of boots again, crunching on sand this time, and echoing. I looked at Miss Ridley. ‘Here come the women,’ she said, without excitement; and we stood and listened as the sound grew loud, then louder, then louder still. It seemed, at last, impossibly loud—for we of course had turned three angles of the floor and, though the women were near, we could not see them. I said, ‘They might be ghosts!’—I remembered how there are said to be legions of Roman soldiers that can be heard passing, sometimes, through the cellars of the houses of the City. I think the grounds at Millbank might echo like that, in the centuries when the prison no longer stands there.
    But Miss Ridley had turned to me. ‘Ghosts!’ she said, studying me queerly. And as she spoke, the prisoners turned the angle of the ward; and then they were suddenly terribly real—not ghosts, not dolls or beads on a string, as they had seemed before, but coarse-faced, slouching women and girls. Their heads went up when they saw us standing there, and when they recognised Miss Ridley their expressions grew meek. Me, however, they seemed to study quite frankly.
    They looked, but went neatly to their cells, and then sat. And behind them came their matron, locking the gates on them.
    This matron’s name, I think, is Miss Manning. ‘Miss Prior is making her first visit here,’ Miss Ridley said to her, and the matron nodded, saying, they had been told to expect me. She smiled. I had taken on a pretty task, she said, calling on their girls! And should I like to speak with one of them now?—I said I might as well. She led me to a cell she had not fastened yet, and beckoned to the woman that had entered it. ‘Here, Pilling,’ she said. ‘Here is the new Lady Visitor, come to take a bit of interest in you. Up, and let her see you. Come on, look slippy!’
    The prisoner came to me and made a curtsey. Her cheek was flushed and her lip slightly gleaming from her brisk circling of the yard. Miss Manning said, ‘Say who you are and why you are here’, and the woman said at once—though stumbling slightly, over the pronunciation of it—‘Susan Pilling, m’m. Here for thieving.’
    Miss Manning showed me then an enamel tablet that hung from a chain beside the entrance to the cell: this gave the woman’s prison number and class, her crime, and the date she was due to be released. I said, ‘How long have you been at Millbank, Pilling?’—She told me, seven months. I nodded. And what age was she? I thought she might be two or three years short of forty. She said, however, that she was twenty-two; and I hesitated at that, then nodded again. How, I asked next, did she care for the life there?
    She replied that she liked it well enough; and that Miss Manning was kind to her.
    I said, ‘I am sure she is.’
    Then there was a silence. I saw the woman gazing at me, and think the matrons also had their eyes upon me. I thought suddenly of Mother, scolding me when I was two-and-twenty, saying I must talk more when we went calling. I must ask the ladies after the health of their children; or after the pleasant places they had visited; or the work they had painted or sewn. I might admire the cut of a lady’s gown . . .
    I looked at Susan Pilling’s mud-brown dress; and then I said, how did she like the costume she must wear? What was it—was it serge, or linsey? Here Miss Ridley stepped