A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there -- in
solitary confinement.
Wearing in his
solitary confinement no fetters that he could polish, and being provided with no drinking-cup that he could carve, be had fallen on the device of ringing alphabetical changes into the two volumes in question, or of entering vast numbers of persons out of the Directory as transacting business with Mr Lightwood.
The walls were white, the carpet red, electric lights blazed in profusion, and the emptiness, the silence, the closed doors all alike and numbered, made me think of the perfect order of some severely luxurious model penitentiary on the
solitary confinement principle.
He knew that this could be no Wieroo, but possibly once a man like himself who had been cast into this pit of
solitary confinement with this hideous result that might in time be his fate, also.
