"Everything's fine and dandy," announced the barearmed farrier as he snapped his little pen-knife shut. But that triumphant grin of his only made me more tired than ever, and I turned away to the tall young nurse on the other side of my bed.
There was perspiration on her forehead, under the eaves of the pale hair crowned with its pointed little cap. She was still smiling, but she looked human and tired and a little fussed.
"Is it a girl?" I asked her. I had intended to make that query a crushingly imperious one. I wanted it to stand as a reproof to them, as a mark of disapproval for all such untimely merriment. But my voice, I found, was amazingly weak and thin. And I wanted to know.
"_It's both_," said the tired-eyed girl in the blue and white uniform. And she, too, nodded her head in a triumphant sort of way, as though the credit for some vast and recent victory lay entirely in her own narrow lap.
"It's both?" I repeated, wondering why she too should fail to give a simple answer to a simple question.
"It's twins!" she said, with a little chirrup of laughter.
"Twins?" I gasped, in a sort of bleat that drove the last of the pea-green mist out of that room with the dead white walls.
"Twins," proclaimed the doctor, "_twins_!" He repeated the monosyllable, converting it into a clarion-call that made me think of a rooster crowing.
"A lovely boy and girl," cooed the third nurse with a bottle of olive-oil in her hand. And by twisting my head a little I was able to see the two wire bassinets, side by side, each holding a little mound of something wrapped in a flannelette blanket.
I shut my eyes, for I seemed to have a great deal to think over. Twins! A boy and girl! Two little new lives in the world! Two warm and cuddling little bairns to nest close against my mother-breast.
"I see _your_ troubles cut out for you," said the doctor as he rolled down his shirt-sleeves.
They were all laughing again. But to me it didn't seem quite such a laughing matter. I was thinking of my layette, and trying to count over my supply of binders and slips and shirts and nighties and wondering how I could out-Solomon Solomon and divide the little dotted Swiss dress edged with the French Val lace of which I'd been so proud. Then I fell to pondering over other problems, equally prodigious, so that it was quite a long time before my mind had a chance to meander on to Dinky-Dunk himself.