a stormy evening when their fevers and wounds made them suffer more
than ever. They lay white with grief in their rows of beds, above
which ignoble science had hung the placards of their maladies.

They were sad, very sad, for it was a day of festival. Their tiny arms
were stretched out on the coverlets, and with their transparent hands
they touched the meager toys that pious grand ladies had brought them.
They did not even know what to do with these playthings. A President
of the Republic had visited them, but they had not understood what it
meant.

Their souls cried out toward God. They said:

"We are the daughters of misery, of scrofula, and of syphilis. We are
the daughters of daughters of shame."

"I," said one, "was dragged out of a cesspool where in her distraction
my mother, the servant of an inn, had thrown me." Another said: "I
was born of a child with an enormous head that had a red gap in the
forehead. My father killed my mother, and he killed himself."

Still others said:

"We are the survivors of abortions and infanticides. Our mothers are
on the lists. Our fathers, cigar in mouth, saunter smiling amid the
tumult of business and the markets. We are born like kings with a
crown on our heads, a crown of red rash."

And God, hearing their cry, came down toward these souls. He entered
the hospital of more than human sorrows. At his approach the fumes