Sunday Small discovers severe neglect in the workhouse nursery when an unexpected overnight assignment brings her face to face with infants left dirty, sore, and hungry while their attendant drinks and sleeps. Rather than accept the treatment as routine, she cleans and feeds the babies through the night. The experience turns care from a task she already loves into a vocation: Sunday begins to imagine opening a foundling home for children like them.

Setting and Assignment

The discovery takes place within a workhouse that organizes residents by gender and divides their days among assigned duties. Men and stronger boys may pick oakum, crush bones for fertilizer, or work in the gardens; women and girls sew uniforms, cook, clean, or labor in the laundry. The inmates rarely gather as families except on Sundays at church, and Sunday has seen the harm that separation can cause. These routines establish a system concerned with sorting and managing residents, rather than sustaining family bonds.

Sunday’s ordinary duties are allocated by Miss Frost, who reads out the list after breakfast. On this occasion, she tells Sunday that a local woman who usually works in the nursery in the evening is ill, and directs the girl to take her place. Sunday is pleased by the prospect but keeps her expression controlled. She has long loved working with the babies, although she has been allowed to go upstairs only occasionally and has learned not to tell Miss Frost how much she wants to be there.

The nursery is in the attic. When Sunday arrives, an elderly woman opens the door and ushers her inside. Eight crude wooden cots stand in a row beneath the sloping roof, and the room is unnaturally quiet. The attendant explains the silence by brandishing a bottle of sloe gin: she gives the babies some when they make a noise. Sunday immediately understands that their quiet is not a sign of contentment. The bottle and the orderly row of cots reveal, in miniature, the difference between keeping children subdued and caring for them.

What Sunday Finds

As Sunday walks along the cots, the infants look up at her. The smell from some of them is overpowering, so she asks where the clean binders are kept. The attendant points to a cupboard and warns her not to spoil the babies by treating them too well. Sunday fetches clean binders and changes them one by one. The stale urine makes her retch; beneath the dirty cloths, the babies’ skin is so sore that it is bleeding. She drops the used binders into a bucket of cold water, where they will wait until they can be boiled in the laundry the next morning.

The babies seem to range from newborns to a few months old. Some try to suck Sunday’s hand as she changes them, making their hunger unmistakable. Their stillness, which the attendant has presented as obedience, instead appears as fear and deprivation: they are too distressed even to whimper. Sunday asks where the milk is and decides to feed them. The woman points to a pan and bottles by a small stove, adding that she gives the milk cold because the babies are hungry enough not to mind.

Sunday ignores the attendant’s indifference. She strikes a match, lights the gas, warms the milk, and pours it into banana-shaped glass bottles with rubber teats at both ends. When she lifts the nearest baby and offers the teat, he drinks so greedily that he nearly chokes. Sunday rocks him as he feeds; he drains the bottle and gives a satisfied burp. The scene makes the neglect concrete: the infant does not need discipline or sedation, but food and the attentive presence of a caregiver.

A Night of Care

The elderly woman does not take part in the work. By the time Sunday finishes tending to the babies, the attendant is snoring, and most of the infants have fallen asleep too. Sunday knows that their comfort may be temporary, but she has at least made sure that they are clean and fed for the moment. She repeats the feeding process in the early hours by candlelight and again as dawn approaches, caring for the infants through a night in which the person assigned to help them remains absent in practice.

When the attendant wakes near six o’clock, Sunday looks at her with contempt: she has not lifted a finger to care for any of the babies. Sunday, by contrast, has worked through the night and received no sleep. Her exhaustion does not erase her response to what she has seen. Before leaving, she looks back at the sleeping infants, still thinking about how deserving they are of love, and resolves to volunteer for nursery work as often as she is permitted.

Consequences and Significance

The experience also changes the scale of Sunday’s ambition. She does not only want to return to the nursery; she begins to imagine creating a foundling home of her own, where abandoned children can receive the love and care denied to the babies she has just tended. The narrative marks this night as a turning point in her life: she has found her vocation. Her aspiration grows out of practical attention to individual needs—clean cloth, warm milk, patient feeding—rather than an abstract wish to reform the world.

The scene belongs to a wider pattern of workhouse deprivation. Later, no longer a resident, Sunday tells Lady Lavinia Huntley that meals were usually poor and describes a punishment cellar where prisoners could be left for days without food or drink. That testimony broadens the picture of institutional neglect beyond the nursery, while confirming the importance of listening to residents’ experience rather than relying on official appearances. Sunday’s account is one part of a later effort to improve conditions; Verity Lockett subsequently reports that meals and the atmosphere have improved and that the new matron has snapped Miss Frost’s split cane. The evidence does not make Sunday’s overnight discovery the sole cause of those changes, but it gives the novel a precise human measure of what reform must address.

The episode’s central contrast is between an institution that assigns duties and a child who recognizes what those duties require. The attendant has the post but abandons its responsibilities; Sunday, though given no authority, responds to each infant’s actual condition. By making attentive care the source of her future purpose, the scene connects the neglected babies to the home Sunday hopes one day to build.