One evening, a few weeks before the birth, Emily passed through the hamlet with her father on their way to interview the young man she had named as responsible for her condition. It was a sad little sight. Emily, who had so recently been romping with the other children, going slowly, unwillingly, and red-eyed from crying, her tell-tale figure enveloped in her mother’s plaid shawl, and her respectable, grey-headed father in his Sunday suit urging her to “Come on!” as though longing to be through with a disagreeable business. Women came to their cottage gates and children left their play to watch them pass by, for every one knew or guessed their errand, and much sympathy was felt towards them on account of Emily’s youth and her parents’ respectability.

The interview turned out even more mortifying than the father could have expected, for Emily had named the young son of the house where she had been in service, and he not only repudiated the charge, but was able to prove that he had been away from home for some time before and after the crucial date. Yet, in spite of the evidence, the neighbours still believed Emily’s version of the story and treated her as a wronged heroine, to be petted and made much of. Perhaps they made too much of her, for what should have been an episode turned into a habit, and, although she never married, Emily had quite a good-sized family.

The hamlet women’s attitude towards the unmarried mother was contradictory. If one of them brought her baby on a visit to the hamlet they all went out of their way to pet and fuss over them. “The pretty dear!” they would cry. “How ever can anybody say such a one as him ought not to be born. Ain’t he a beauty! Ain’t he a size! They always say, you know, that that sort of child is the finest. An’ don’t you go mindin’ what folks says about you, me dear. It’s only the good girls, like you, that has ‘em; the others is too artful!”

But they did not want their own daughters to have babies before they were married. “I allus tells my gals,” one woman would say confidentially to another, “that if they goes getting theirselves into trouble they’ll have to go to th’ work’us, for I won’t have ‘em at home.” And the other would agree, saying, “So I tells mine, an’ I allus think that’s why I’ve had no trouble with ‘em.”