_The foreman-mason JOHN, a good-natured, bearded man of forty, sits at the desk in the foreground taking notes from the building plans._ _MRS. JOHN sits sewing on the small platform, by the farther window. She is very pale. There is something gentle and pain-touched about her, but her face shows an expression of deep contentment, which is broken only now and then by a momentary gleam of restlessness and suspense. A neat new perambulator stands by her side. In it lies a newborn child._ JOHN [_Modestly._] Mother, how'd it be if I was to open the window jus' a speck an' was to light my pipe for a bit? MRS. JOHN Does you have to smoke? If not, you better let it be! JOHN No, I don't has to, mother. Only I'd like to! Never mind, though. A quid'll be just as good in the end. [_With comfortable circumstantiality he prepares a new quid._ MRS. JOHN [_After a brief silence._] How's that? You has to go to the public registry office again? JOHN That's what he told me, that I had to come back again an' tell him exackly ... that I had to give the exack place an' time when that little kid was born. MRS. JOHN [_Holding a needle in her mouth._] Well, why didn't you tell him that right away? JOHN How was I to know it? I didn't know, you see. MRS. JOHN You didn't know that? JOHN Well, I wasn't here, was I? MRS. JOHN You wasn't. That's right. If you goes an' leaves me here in Berlin an' stays from one year's end to another in Hamburg, an' at most comes to see me once a month--how is you to know what happens in your own home? JOHN Don't you want me to go where the boss has most work for me? I goes where I c'n make good money. MRS. JOHN I wrote you in my letter as how our little boy was born in this here room. JOHN I knows that an' I told him that. Ain't that natural, I axes him, that the child was born in our room? An' he says that ain't natural at all. Well then, says I, for all I cares, maybe it was up in the loft with the rats an' mice! I got mad like 'cause he said maybe the child wasn't born here at all. Then he yells at me: What kind o' talk is that? What? says I. I takes an interest in wages an' earnin' an' not in talk--not me, Mr. Registrar! An' now I'm to give him the exack day an' hour ... MRS. JOHN An' didn't I write it all out for you on a bit o' paper? JOHN When a man's mad he's forgetful. I believe if he'd up and axed me: Is you Paul John, foreman-mason? I'd ha' answered: I don' know. Well an' then I'd been a bit jolly too an' taken a drink or two with Fritz. An' while we was doin' that who comes along but Schubert an' Karl an' they says as how I has to set up on account o' bein' a father now. Those fellers, they didn't let me go an' they was waitin' downstairs in front o' the public registry. An' so I kept thinkin' o' them standin' there. So when he axes me on what day my wife was delivered, I didn't know nothin' an' just laughed right in his face. MRS. JOHN