But I made no arrangements for myself until my Welsh landlady came up to my room one day and asked if I had settled with a doctor.  When I answered no, she held up her hands and cried: 

“Good gracious!  Just as I thought.  Thee’st got to lose no time, though.”

Happily there was a doctor in our street nearly every day, and if I wished it she would call him up to me.  I agreed and the doctor came next morning.

He was a tall, elderly man with cold eyes, compressed lips, and a sour expression, and neither his manner nor his speech gave any hint of a consciousness (which I am sure every true doctor must have) that in coming to a woman in my condition he was entering one of the sacred chambers of human life.

He asked me a few abrupt questions, told me when he would come again, and then spoke about his fee.

“My fee is a guinea and I usually get it in advance,” he said, whereupon I went to my drawer, and took out a sovereign and a shilling, not without a certain pang at seeing so much go in a moment after I had been saving so long.

The doctor had dropped the money into his waistcoat pocket with oh! such a casual air, and was turning to go, when my Welsh landlady said: 

“Her’s not doing herself justice in the matter, of food, doctor.”

“Why, what do you eat?” asked the doctor, and as well as I could, out of my dry and parched throat, I told him.

“Tut! tut!  This will never do,” he said.  “It’s your duty to your child to have better food than that.  Something light and nourishing every day, such as poultry, fish, chicken broth, beef-tea, and farinaceous foods generally.”

I gasped.  ’What was the doctor thinking about?

“Remember,” he said, with his finger up, “the health of the child is intimately dependent on the health of the mother.  When the mother is in a morbid state it affects the composition of the blood, and does great harm to the health of the offspring, both immediately and in after life.  Don’t forget now.  Good day!”

That was a terrible shock to me.  In my great ignorance and great love I had been depriving myself for the sake of my child, and now I learned that I had all the time been doing it a grave and perhaps life-long injury!

Trying to make amends I sent out for some of the expensive foods the doctor had ordered me, but when they were cooked I found to my dismay that I had lost the power of digesting them.

My pain at this discovery was not lessened next day when my Welsh landlady brought up a nurse whom I had asked her to engage for me.

The woman was a human dumpling with a discordant voice, and her first interest, like that of the doctor, seemed to centre in her fee.

She told me that her usual terms were a guinea for the fortnight, but when she saw my face fall (for I could not help thinking how little I had left) she said: 

“Some ladies don’t need a fortnight, though.  Mrs. Wagstaffe, for instance, she never has no more than five days, and on the sixth she’s back at her mangle.  So if five will do, ma’am, perhaps ten and six won’t hurt you.”