to the secretary while he said all this, with the cast-metal
face of a man who was utterly unconscious of the enormity of the crime
he was describing.

"Before a committee of gentlemen?" I asked.

"That is so."

"Who are to ask her all those questions?"

"Yes."

"And then they are to change her baby's name?"

"Yes."

"Is she told what the new name is to be?"

"No, but she is given a piece of parchment containing a number which
corresponds with the name in our books."

I rose to my feet, flushing up to the eyes I think, trembling from head
to foot I know, and, forgetting who and what I was and why I was
there--a poor, helpless, penniless being seeking shelter for her
child--I burst out on the man in all the mad wrath of outraged
motherhood.

"And you call this a Christian institution!" I said. "You take a poor
woman in her hour of trouble and torture her with an inquisition into
the most secret facts of her life, in public, and before a committee of
men. And then you take her child, and so far as she is concerned you
bury it, and give her a ticket to its grave. A hospital? This is no
hospital. It is a cemetery. And yet you dare to write over your gates
the words of our Lord--our holy and loving and blessed Lord--who said,
'Suffer little children. . . .'"

But what is the use of repeating what I said then (perhaps unjustly) or
afterwards in the silence of my own room and the helpless intoxication
of my rage?

It was soon stamped out of me.

By the end of another week I was driven to such despair by the continued
extortions of the Olivers that, seeing an advertisement in the
Underground Railway of a Home for children in the country (asking for
subscriptions and showing a group of happy little people playing under a
chestnut-tree in bloom), I decided to make one more effort.

"They can't all be machines," I thought, "with the founders' hearts
crushed out of them."

The day was Friday, when work was apt to heap up at the Jew's, and Mrs.
Abramovitch had brought vests enough to my room to cover my bed, but
nevertheless I put on my hat and coat and set out for the orphanage.

It was fifteen miles on the north side of London, so it cost me
something to get there. But I was encouraged by the homelike appearance
of the place when I reached it, and still more by finding that it was
conducted by women, for at last, I thought, the woman-soul would speak
to me.

But hardly had I told my story to the matron, rep