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:
"My dear young person, we could have half the orphan children in London on your terms. Before we accept such a child as yours we expect the parent to give us a legal undertaking that she relinquishes all rights in it until it is sixteen years of age."