For three days the mother was kept in a suspense that served to protract the boy's illness, but, at the end of this time, largely owing to Mrs Gowler's advice, he began to improve. The day that his disquieting symptoms disappeared, which was also the day on which he recovered his appetite, was signalised by the arrival of Perigal's reply to Mavis's letter from Durley Road, announcing the birth of their son. In this, he congratulated her on her fortitude, and assured her that her happiness and well-being would always be his first consideration. It also told her that she was the best and most charming girl he had ever met; meeting with other women only the more strengthened this conviction.
Mavis's heart leapt with a great joy. So long as she was easily first in her lover's eyes, nothing else mattered. She had been foolish ever to have done other than implicitly trust him. His love decorated the one-time sparrow that she was with feathers of gorgeous hue.
Days succeeded each other within the four walls of Mrs Gowler's nursing home much as anywhere else, although in each twenty-four hours there usually occurred what were to Mavis's sensitive eyes and ears unedifying sights, agonised cries of women in torment. All day and night, with scarcely any intermission, could be heard the wailing of one or more babies in different rooms in the house. Mrs Gowler's nursing home attracted numberless girls from all parts of the great city, whose condition necessitated their temporary retirement from employment, whatever it might be. Mavis gathered that they were mostly the mean sort of general servant, who had succumbed to the blandishments of the men who make it a practice to prey on this class of woman. So far as Mavis could see, they were mostly plain and uninteresting-looking; also, that the majority of them stayed only a few days, lack of means preventing them being at Mrs Gowler's long enough to recover their health. They would depart, hugging their baby and carrying their poor little parcel of luggage, to be swallowed up and lost in London's ravening and cavernous maw. As they sadly left the house, Mavis could not help thinking that these deserted women were indeed human sparrows, who needed no small share of their heavenly Father's loving kindness to prevent them from falling and being utterly lost in the mire of London. Once or twice during Mavis's stay, the house was so full that three would sleep in one room, each of whom would go downstairs to the parlour, which was the front room on the ground floor, for the dreaded ordeal, to be taken upstairs as soon as possible after the baby was born. Mavis, who had always looked on the birth of a child as something sacred and demanding the utmost privacy, was inexpressibly shocked at the wholesale fashion in which children were brought into the world at Mrs Gowler's.
There was much that was casual, and, therefore, callous about the circumstances attending the ceaseless succession of births; they might as well have been kittens, their mothers cats, so Mavis thought, owing to the mean indignities attaching to the initial stages of their motherhood. It did not occur to her how house-room, furniture, doctors, nurses, and servants supply dignity to a commonplace process of nature. It seemed to Mavis that Mrs Gowler lived in an atmosphere of horror and pain. At the same time, the girl had the sense to realise that Mrs Gowler had her use in life, inasmuch as she provided a refuge for the women, which salved their pride (no small matter) by enabling them to forego entering the workhouse infirmary, which otherwise could not have been avoided.
Oscar inspired Mavis with an inexpressible loathing. For the life of her, she could not understand why such terrible caricatures of humanity were permitted to live, and were not put out of existence at birth. The common trouble of Mrs Gowler's lodgers seemed to establish a feeling of fellowship amongst them during the time that they were there. Mavis was not a little surprised to receive one day a request from a woman, to the effect that she should give this person's baby a "feed," the mother not being so happily endowed in this respect as Mavis. The latter's indignant refusal gave rise to much comment in the place.
The "permanent" was soon on her feet, an advantage which she declared was owing to her previous fecundity. Mavis could see how the "permanent" despised her because she was merely nursing her first-born.
"'As Piggy 'ad a go at your box yet?" she one day asked Mavis, who replied:
"I'm too careful. I always keep it locked."
"Locks ain't nothin' to her. If you've any letters from a gentleman, as would compromise him, burn them."
"Why?"