no right to be
ashamed.

In this mood I set off for the Registry Office. It was a long way from
where I lived, and carrying baby in my arms I was tired when I got
there.

I found it to be a kind of private house, with an open vestibule and a
black-and-white enamelled plate on the door-post, saying "Registry of
Births and Deaths."

In the front parlour (which reminded me of Mr. Curphy's office in
Holmtown) there was a counter by the door and a large table covered with
papers in the space within.

Two men sat at this table, an old one and a young one, and I remember
that I thought the old one must have been reading aloud from a newspaper
which he held open in his hand, for as I entered the young one was
saying:

"Extraordinary! Perfectly extraordinary! And everybody thought they were
lost, too!"

In the space between the door and the counter two women were waiting.
Both were poor and obviously agitated. One had a baby in her arms, and
when it whimpered for its food she unbuttoned her dress and fed it
openly. The other woman, whose eyes were red as if she had been crying,
wore a coloured straw hat over which, in a pitiful effort to assume
black, she had stretched a pennyworth of cheap crepe.

In his own good time the young man got up to attend to them. He was a
very ordinary young clerk in a check suit, looking frankly bored by the
dull routine of his daily labour, and palpably unconscious of the fact
that every day and hour of his life he was standing on the verge of the
stormiest places of the soul.

Opening one of two registers which lay on the counter (the Register of
Births) he turned first to the woman with the child. Her baby, a boy,
was illegitimate, and in her nervousness she stumbled and stammered, and
he corrected her sharply.

Then opening the other register (the Register of Deaths) he attended to
the woman in the crepe. She had lost her little girl, two years old, and
produced a doctor's certificate. While she gave the particulars she held
a soiled handkerchief to her mouth as if to suppress a sob, but the
young clerk's composure remained undisturbed.

I do not know if it was the agitation of the two poor women that made me
nervous, but when they were gone and my turn had come, I was hot and
trembling.

The young clerk, however, who was now looking at me for the first time,
had suddenly become respectful. With a bow and a smile he asked me if I
wished to register my child, and when I answered y