All the babies seem to me to be blonde and of exactly the same size and quite square, about one year old, square, and very adorable. I never can remember which are the boys and which the girls.
The mothers come from, we don't know where; and are, we don't know what.
Last year there was written on a card and posted on the wall by the door, a thing that I think rather beautiful—
"Toute femme enciente, ou qui nourrit son enfant, peut venir tous les jours prendre ici ses repas de midi et du soir, sans craindre aucune question."
They came, at noon and at dusk, sick, ugly, stupid things, twice a day like that, from two hundred and fifty to three hundred of them. Bearing the children of soldiers, the children that will be France, they came without need of more than making each of them her X in the book on the shelf by the door.
There is not room for more than forty-five at a time at the tables in the room that used to be a butcher's shop. They had to wait in turn outside in the street.
Outside in the ugly, forlorn street they waited, an ugly, forlorn line, in wind or rain.
They all seemed frightened, not of the things that there really were to fear, like sickness and poverty and war, but of just opening the door and coming in and making their mark in the book, and finding places at the tables.
They would have the door always kept shut. The steam of the soup was thick and horrid, always, in the room. I hate the smell of the poor. I hated those deformed, bedraggled, dulled women, as I served their soup. I hated them, because they would have the door kept shut. But I loved them, because their children would be France.