But at this, she observed with some surprise, “his feelings burst their confinement.”30
Did he slam the table? Stand up with force? Grab at her elbows to shake her roughly? We do not know; she did not say. It could have been a glare or a grasp or a guttural roar. All we know is that, with strong feeling, he finally reacted to her words.
Elizabeth was shocked—perhaps most of all by the fact that this alone had aroused his anger. She would never understand it. In the cold of that November day, however, she simply shivered under the heat of his furious stare. “He seemed determined, from that moment, to either rule or ruin me.”31
Nonetheless, she found the courage to make her last words a warning. She was going to be released one day—of that she was sure. And if the doctor didn’t change his ways, she’d hold him to account.
“Remember, Dr. McFarland,” she cautioned. “This is your last chance… Repentance or exposure!”32
The choice—just like Elizabeth herself—was entirely in his hands.
Elizabeth sat alone in her private room on Seventh Ward, but she could not settle. It was Saturday night—some five days after she’d presented McFarland with her reproof—and as yet, the doctor had not responded. Somewhere deep inside, she felt a “presentiment of coming evil.”33
Restless, she checked again that her documents were safely hidden in her mirror. She sorted through her clothes and “put every article of my wardrobe in perfect order.”34 She wished she had more clothes to sort through; as the Illinois winter started to bite, the items she’d happily worn in the summer now seemed insufficient, especially because her room was “so cold that a cloth would freeze in it.”35 She’d complained to McFarland about the temperature, but he’d turned away, speechless, the word wizard no longer having any spells for her.
He was, truly, a skinflint superintendent. The sole critique ever made of him by his trustees was that he kept too tight a hold on the asylum purse strings, to the detriment of his patients’ comfort. McFarland spent just $2.77 （$85.76） per patient per week, the cheapest of all the asylums in America. Yet he liked to boast of “the almost monastic plainness”36 of his hospital.
Elizabeth left off fidgeting with her wardrobe. She cast her eyes over her now-familiar room. There was her personal pitcher and bowl, her mirror, the sewing box she’d brought from home. Yet none of it served to soothe her troubled spirit. She could only hope that prayer might help.
That evening, she accompanied the other Seventh Ward women to chapel service. They filed out together: a crocodile of community that walked as one.
Long ago, building work had begun on a bespoke asylum chapel, but insufficient funds had curtailed it. Instead, prayers were held in a standard hall; not all who wanted to attend could fit inside. Yet the privileged women of Seventh Ward were always granted this favor.
Elizabeth and her friends edged into the hall, which held about one hundred people and was “neat and well-arranged.”37 The prayers were a treat: a daily occasion of “pleasing anticipation”38 at which a “soul-cheering doctrine”39 was heard.
As the service ended, Elizabeth indeed felt merrier. She joined the crocodile line of Seventh Ward women and began to make her way out.
Suddenly, she was stopped in her tracks by a strong hand clutching at her arm.
It was McFarland. He led her away from her friends.
Together, they walked those long corridors that ran the length of the building. Black night was beyond the barred windows now, the summer sunshine of days past long gone. Elizabeth felt her disquiet return as they wended their way through the hospital.
This wasn’t the way to Seventh Ward.
Eventually, they reached a heavy door. It wasn’t one she’d seen before. McFarland pulled out his keys, for Elizabeth, the asylum favorite, had no key for this particular lock. With an ominous sound, the door opened, and Elizabeth caught her first glimpse of the ward that lay beyond.
Even as the door screeched open, the smell hit her in a noxious wave. She could taste it, a “most fetid scent at the pit of my stomach,”40 which reeked of unwashed bodies and far, far worse. It was almost intolerable, even before she’d stepped inside.
But McFarland took her arm again and dragged her over the threshold. She stumbled in, boots clicking on the cold, uncarpeted floor. There were none of the artistic delights of Seventh Ward here. Hard wooden benches lined the corridor. Even the furniture in the rooms beyond was different: husk mattresses, iron bedsteads, and, peculiarly, no chairs at all.