Our last call was at the home of a private society in a little brick house that seemed to lean against the wall of a large lying-in hospital in the West End of London.

At the moment of our arrival the Matron was presiding in the drawing-room over a meeting of a Missionary League for the Conversion of the Jews, so we were taken through a narrow lobby into a little back-parlour which overlooked, through a glass screen, a large apartment, wherein a number of young women, who had the appearance of dressmakers, ladies’ maids, and governesses, were sewing tiny pieces of linen and flannel that were obviously baby-clothes.

There were no carpets on the floors and the house had a slight smell of carbolic.  The tick-tick of sewing machines on the other side of the screen mingled with the deadened sound of the clapping of hands in the room overhead.

After a while there was rustle of dresses coming down the bare stairs, followed by the opening and closing of the front door, and then the Matron came into the parlour.

She was a very tall, flat-bosomed woman in a plain black dress, and she seemed to take in our situation instantly.  Without waiting for Mildred’s explanation she began to ask my name, my age, and where I came from.

Mildred fenced these questions as well as she could, and then, with even more nervousness than ever, made the same request as before.

The Matron seemed aghast.

“Most certainly not,” she said.  “My committee would never dream of such a thing.  In the interests of the unfortunate girls who have fallen from the path of virtue, as well as their still more unfortunate offspring, we always make the most searching inquiries.  In fact, we keep a record of every detail of every case.  Listen to this,” she added, and opening a large leather-bound hook like a ledger, she began to read one of its entries: 

"H.J., aged eighteen years, born of very respectable parents, was led astray [that was not the word] in a lonely road very late at night by a sailor who was never afterwards heard of. . . ."

But I could bear no more, and rising from my seat I fled from the room and the house into the noisy street outside.

All day long my whole soul had been in revolt.  It seemed to me that, while God in His gracious mercy was giving me my child to comfort and console me, to uplift and purify me, and make me a better woman than I had been before, man, with his false and cruel morality, with his machine-made philanthropy, was trying to use it as a whip to punish not only me but Martin.

But that it should never do!  Never as long as I lived!  I would die in the streets first!

Perhaps I was wrong, and did not understand myself, and certainly Mildred did not understand me.  When she rejoined me in the street we turned our faces homeward and were half way back to the boarding-house before we spoke again.