More than that, he told me that on being received the child was immediately re-registered and given a new name, in order that it might be cut off from the sin of its parents and the contamination of their shame.

It would be impossible for me to describe the feelings with which I listened 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, repeating my request (very timidly this time and with such a humble, humble heart) that I might be allowed to recover my child as soon as I found myself able to provide for her, than she stopped me and said: