Miss Harris was to go away to another case at the end of the month.  But Mrs. Ruston (she was the staff officer) and Doris, the maid, were destined, it appeared, to be as permanent as the babies.  But Rose had the germ of an idea of her own about that.

They got them named with very little difficulty.  The boy was Rodney, of course, after his father and grandfather before him.  Rose was a little afraid Rodney would want the girl named after her, and was relieved to find he didn’t.  There’d never in the world be but one Rose for him, he said.  So Rose named the girl Portia.

They kept Rose in bed for three weeks; flat on her back as much as possible, which was terribly irksome to her, since her strength and vitality were coming back so fast.  The irksomeness was added to by a horrible harness largely of whalebone.  Rose got the notion, too, that the purpose of all this was not quite wholly hygienic.  Harriet had said once:  “You know the most distinguished thing about you, Rose, dear—­about your looks, I mean—­is that lovely boyish line of yours.  It will be a perfect crime if you let yourself spread out.”

This wasn’t the sort of consideration to make the inactivity any easier to endure.  She might have rebelled, had it not been for that germinant idea of hers.  It wouldn’t do, she saw, in the light of that, to give them any excuse for calling her unreasonable.

At the end of this purgatorial three weeks, she was carried to a chair and allowed to sit up a little, and by the end of another, to walk about—­just a few steps at a time of course.  One Sunday morning, Rodney carried her up-stairs to the nursery to see her babies bathed.  This was a big room at the top of the house which Florence McCrea had always vaguely intended to make into a studio.  But, in a paralysis of indecision as to what sort of studio to make it (book-binding, pottery and art weaving called her about equally) she had left the thing bare.

Rodney had given Harriet carte blanche to go ahead and fit it up before he and Rose came back from the seashore, and the layette was a monument to Harriet’s thoroughgoing practicality.  There had been a wild day of supplementing of course, when it was discovered that there were two babies instead of one.

The room, when they escorted Rose into it, was a terribly impressive place.  The spirit of a barren sterile efficiency brooded everywhere.  And this appearance of barrenness obtained despite the presence of an enormous number of articles; a pair of scales, a perfect battery of electric heaters of various sorts; rows of vacuum jars for keeping things cold or hot; a small sterilizing oven; instruments and appliances that Rose couldn’t guess the uses or the names of.  Mrs. Ruston, of course, was master of them all, and Doris flew about to do her bidding, under a watchful and slightly suspicious eye. (Doris was the sort of looking girl who might be suspected of kissing a tiny pink hand when no one was looking.)