IV + 

Jane sat in the sunny corner of Cicily’s room in the Lying-in Hospital, holding the week-old twins in her arms. How ridiculous, how adorable of them to be twins, she was thinking, as she gazed down at their absurdly red, absurdly wrinkled, absurdly tiny faces. Little John Ward and little Jane Ward Bridges! John and Jane⁠—Cicily’s son and daughter! + 

Jane had wondered, a trifle anxiously, if she would experience a pang at the sight of a grandchild⁠—if grandmother-hood had birth pangs of its own. But no⁠—she had produced her grand-twins, vicariously to be sure, without any spiritual travail. She loved being a grandmother. She loved little Jane, and especially little John Ward Bridges, little John Ward, who had come into the world to take up life and his name, just six weeks after his great-grandfather had left it. Life had gone on. + 

Jane wished, terribly, that her father might have lived to see this great-grandson. He so nearly had. Things happened so quickly as you grew older. Jane felt she had barely recovered from those three dreadful days when her father’s life was hanging in the balance, from the shock of his death, from the pity and sorrow of the readjustment of her mother’s life, when the hour arrived, at two o’clock one March morning, when, stealing out of bed and leaving a note for Stephen on her pincushion, she had rushed with Cicily in the motor from the Lakewood house to the Lying-in Hospital, where she had sat in a waiting-room, a beautifully furnished, green-walled waiting-room that looked exactly like the bleak parlour of an exceptionally good hotel, for six, eight, ten hours, waiting for Cicily’s twins to come into the world. + 

Cicily had been born in the house on Pine Street. Jenny and Steve in the blue bedroom at Lakewood. Jane did not entirely hold with hospitals as a stage set for birth. In spite of surgeon’s plaster labels stuck on newborn shoulder blades, in spite of scientific footprints taken in birth-rooms, Jane had been terribly afraid that the twins would be mixed up with someone else’s babies. Cicily had laughed at her. + 

Cicily had laughed at her, consistently, throughout the whole terrible ordeal of birth. Laughed at her as they stole from the Lakewood house with the elaborate precaution not to waken Stephen. Laughed at her in the motor in that hurried drive through the nocturnal boulevards, laughed at the sight of that beautifully furnished waiting-room, laughed even between ether gasps in her breathless struggle, the last few minutes before the twins had arrived. Laughed most of all, in the tranquillity of her narrow, ordered bed, as she lay with the newborn babies in her arms, and said, twinkling up at Jane’s joyful, relieved countenance: + 

“Well, if this is the curse of Eve, I don’t think so much of it! What have women been howling about down the ages? Why, it’s nothing⁠—it’s really nothing⁠—to go through for two babies!” + 

Jane had stood astounded at her courage. Her courage and her common sense⁠—the two great virtues of the rising generation. Freedom from sentimentality. Freedom from the old taboos that had shackled humanity for generations. Bravery and bravado⁠—they would take the rising generation far. + 

Cicily was lying, now, in the tranquillity of the ordered bed across the room from Jane. The room was a bower of flowers. Cicily was wearing a blue silk negligee that Muriel had sent her. Her lips were pale, but her eyes were bright and her dandelion head burned on the pillow like a yellow flame. She was holding a letter from Jack in her hands. + 

“I’m so happy, Mumsy,” she said. “He’ll be home in four weeks. Do you honestly think we can keep him from knowing it was twins until he gets here?” + 

“I honestly do,” smiled Jane. + 

“If Belle didn’t write Albert. She swears she didn’t.” + 

“I don’t believe she did,” smiled Jane. + 

“Poor Belle!” laughed Cicily. “She’s so envious of me⁠—with everything over.” + 

“It will be over for Belle next week,” smiled Jane. + 

“But it won’t be twins!” said Cicily proudly. “Not if there’s anything in the law of chances!” + 

“It probably won’t be twins,” smiled Jane. + 

“I’ve put it over Belle,” laughed Cicily, “all along the line. Jack’s twice as nice as Albert and my baby’s twice as many as hers!” + 

“Nevertheless,” said Jane, “I dare say Belle will continue to prefer her own husband and her own baby.” + 

“I suppose she will,” said Cicily, “but I prefer mine. Give them to me, Mumsy, before Miss Billings comes in. It’s almost time to nurse them.” + 