Widnes Examiner. — 1899-09-08 (Widnes, Cheshire, England)

CHAPTER XVIII  THE SACRIFICE.  "If my husband wishes to divorce me I shad not appeal, but I cannot tell this lie, I must defend myself when I am innocent." "Very well, Lady Eastlake, since that is your decision • your husband shall divorce you certainly, and repudiate your child, and so shall I, then it may go to the workhouse. Good-bye, I shall not attempt to argue the matter further with you." "Stay for a moment, madam—your Grace, an let me think what is best to do. What is my duty? 0 God, do not forsake me altogether in this hour of my uncertainty." The harrowing interview between the despairing Hope Eastlake and her implacable foe, the Duchess Valerie, had an appropriate setting. A cell in the country gaol, to which the hapless prisoner had been removed after her conviction. Last time the rivals had faced each other had been in her Grace's dressing-room at Falaise. Then the Duchess had good cause to congratulate herself on her superior attractions, even although unknowing that the other had won the game. Now she was triumphant, and the contrast was more striking than ever; sorrow, anxiety, shame, and hopeless despair had robbed that delicate face of its fairness. The prison barber had shorn her golden tresses, and the prison dressmaker disguised her form of all its grace completely. The most queenly woman on earth would be hideous with a felon's costume on. It is in this way that the Government contrives to punish female criminals, by wounding them on the one point on which all women are sensitive and weak—their clothing. A woman can take extra work, or less rations much more philosophically than a man can, but the gorge of the most hardened criminal rises against the garb she is compelled to wear during her incarceration. They become morbid, brooding upon the figure they cut before the eyes of the warders. They get hysterical and tear up their clothes. They become murderous and more hardened and demoniac than they were before in their outraged vanity, self-disgust, and loathing of this corrupting dress. In fact, all that the silent system does to injure the mental and moral nature of the male convicts this diabolical punishment does to the women.  The parsons, priests, and missionaries find themselves sadly handicapped by this hideous fashion. No woman can possibly listen to religious instruction of any kind while her mind is filled with that nightmare. She never forgets it for an instant, awake or asleep. It is the horror and the hatred of her prison days, and it fills her with a bitter hatred and deadly sense of degradation that slay all hopes of her redemption. Before the female convict gets callous on this point she must have lost for ever all sense of order, shame and womanhood. She has become a mindless and loathsome beast. Therefore, I contend, that to inflict this outrage on feminine humanity is as barbarous as branding them on the cheek, or slicing off their ears and noses.  This poor and innocent prisoner, however, had no thought of such small vanities as her shorn hair or shapeless gown at present. Neither did she care how she looked to this beautiful and pitiless enemy who now watched her with such scornful eyes. It is written that the Roman child saint, Agnes, blushed with modest shame, even under the torture, u-lien her executioners tore her robe from her shouders. If so, then her torture was less engrossing than that which Hope Eastlake was now enduring. She sat on her hard pallet, with her thin fingers claspine and unclasping each other her face erev