He
read the newspapers and reviews of the day and was aware who Vivie
Warren was. He probably made no unfair difference in her case from
any other, but so far as he could mould and bend the prison
discipline and rules it was his practice not to use a razor for
stone-chipping or a cold-chisel for shaving. He therefore put Vivie
to tasks co-ordinated with her ability and the deftness of her
hands--such as book-binding. She had of course to wear prison
dress--a thing of no importance in her eyes--and her cell was like
all the cells in that and other British prisons previous to the
newest reforms--dark, rather damp, cruelly cold in winter, and
disagreeable in smell; badly ventilated and oppressively ugly. But
it was at any rate clean. She had not the cockroaches, bugs, fleas
and lice that the earliest Suffragists of 1908 had to complain of.
Five years of outspoken protests on the part of educated,
delicate-minded women had wrought great reforms in our prisons--the
need for which till then was not apparent to the perceptions of
Visiting Magistrates.
The food was better, the wardresses were less harsh, the chaplains a
little more endurable, though still the worst feature in the prison
personnel, with their unreasoning Bibliolatry, their contemptuous
patronage, their lack of Christian pity--Christ had never spoken to
_them_, Vivie often thought--their snobbishness.
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