stitution. Those two droll, thin
voiced, squirming little mites that were exhibited to her every morning,
were as foreign to her, as detached from her, as if they had been
brought into the house in a basket.

There was a certain basis of reason back of this. At some time, during
those early hours of misty half-consciousness, it had been decided that
two children would be too much for her to attempt to nurse.

She had a notion that this idea hadn't originated with the doctor,
though it was he who had stated it to her with the most plausible
firmness. Rodney had backed the doctor up, firmly, too. Rose was only a
girl in years--why, just a child herself; hadn't had her twenty-second
birthday yet; the labor had been long, she was very weak, the children
were big and vigorous, and she couldn't hope to supply them both for
more than a very few weeks, anyway. And, at this time of year, as the
doctor said, there was no difficulty to be apprehended from bottle
feeding. It would be better on all accounts.

Still, it didn't sound exactly like Roddy's idea either.

When Harriet came in for the first time to see her, Rose knew. Harriet
was living here now, running the house for Rodney, while Rose was laid
up. Doing it beautifully well, too, through all the confusion of nurses
and all. Not the slightest jar or creak of their complex domestic
machinery ever reached Rose in the big chamber where she lay. Harriet
said:

"I think you're in great luck to have had two at once; get your duty to
posterity done that much sooner. And, of course, you couldn't possibly
be expected to nurse two great creatures like that."

Rose acquiesced. What was the use of struggling against so formidable a
unanimity? She would have struggled though, she knew, but for that queer
trick Fate had played her. Her heart ached, as did her breasts. But that
was for the lips of the baby--the baby she hadn't had!

When she found that struggling with herself, denouncing herself for a
brute, didn't serve to bring up the feelings toward the twins that she
knew any proper mother ought to have, she buried the dark fact as deep
as she could, and pretended. It was only before Rodney that the pretense
was necessary. And with him, really, it was hardly a pretense at all. He
was such a child himself, in his gleeful delight over the possession of
a son and a daughter, that she felt for him, tenderly, mistily,
luminously, the very emotion she was trying to capture for them-