When the twins were very young, people were most funny in the way in which they seemed to think it necessary to feel carefully about to make sure whether condolence or congratulations were in order.  The Severely Protestant was greatly agitated, as, being himself the possessor of an overflowing quiverful, his position was difficult.  After making sure which was the right side of the fence, and placing himself on it, he tugged painfully at his starved red beard, and made an elaborate address ending in a parallel,—­the idea of the complete Bible being in two volumes, the Old and New Testament, each being so necessary to the other, and so inseparable, that they were only comparable to twins!

Father and Evan were present at the time,—­I dared not look at either,—­and as soon as we were again alone, the room shook with laughter, until Martha Corkle, who was then in temporary residence, popped in to be sure that I was not being unduly agitated.

“The Old and New Testament, I wonder which is which?” gasped father, going upstairs to look at the uninteresting if promising woolly bundles by light of this startling suggestion.

Now, however, the joke has developed a serious side, as their two characters, though in no wise precocious, have become distinctive.  Ian represents the Old, primitive and direct, the “sword of the Lord and Gideon” type, while Richard is the New, the reconciler and peacemaker.

* * * * *

The various congratulations that the twins were boys, from my standpoint I took as a matter of course, even though I had always heard that boys gave the most worry and girls were referred to among our friends and neighbours as the greatest comforts in a home unless they did something decidedly unusual, fitting into nooks, and often taking up and bearing burdens the brothers left behind.  But when many people who had either daughters or nieces of their own, and might be said to be in that mystic ring called “Society,” congratulated me pointedly about the boys, I began to ponder about the matter mother-wise.  Then, three years ago the New York Colony seized upon the broad acres along the Bluffs, and dotted two miles with the elaborate stone and brick houses they call cottages; not for permanent summer homes (the very rich, the spenders, have no homes), but merely hotels in series.  These, for the spring and fall between seasons and week-end parties and golfing, men and girls gay in red and green coats, replaced the wild flowers in the shorn outlying fields.  I watched these girls, and, beginning to understand, wondered if I had grown old before my time, or if I were too young to comprehend their point of view, for, to their strange enlightenment I was practically as yet unborn.

Lavinia Dorman says caustically that I really belong with her in the middle of the last century, and she, born to what father says was really the best society and privilege of New York life, like his college chum Martin Cortright, is now swept quite aside by the swirl.