n on the same day and in the same hour, and they were only
different in this, that one of them was a boy and the other one was a
girl. Nobody was able to tell how this had happened, and, for the first
time in their lives, the Philosophers were forced to admire an event
which they had been unable to prognosticate; but having proved by many
different methods that the children were really children, that what
must be must be, that a fact cannot be controverted, and that what
has happened once may happen twice, they described the occurrence
as extraordinary but not unnatural, and submitted peacefully to a
Providence even wiser than they were.

The Philosopher who had the boy was very pleased because, he said, there
were too many women in the world, and the Philosopher who had the girl
was very pleased also because, he said, you cannot have too much of a
good thing: the Grey Woman and the Thin Woman, however, were not in the
least softened by maternity-they said that they had not bargained for
it, that the children were gotten under false presences, that they were
respectable married women, and that, as a protest against their wrongs,
they would not cook any more food for the Philosophers. This was
pleasant news for their husbands, who disliked the women's cooking
very much, but they did not say so, for the women would certainly
have insisted on their rights to cook had they imagined their husbands
disliked the results: therefore, the Philosophers besought their wives
every day to cook one of their lovely dinners again, and this the women
always refused to do.

They all lived together in a small house in the very centre of a dark
pine wood. Into this place the sun never shone because the shade was too
deep, and no wind ever came there either, because the boughs were too
thick, so that it was the most solitary and quiet place in the world,
and the Philosophers were able to hear each other thinking all day long,
or making speeches to each other, and these were the pleasantest
sounds they knew of. To them there were only two kinds of sounds
anywhere--these were conversation and noise: they liked the first very
much indeed, but they spoke of the second with stern disapproval, and,
even when it was made by a bird, a breeze, or a shower of rain, they
grew angry and demanded that it should be abolished. Their wives seldom
spoke at all and yet they were never silent: they communicated with each
other by a kind of physical telegraphy