No other child, of course, would ever mean to her quite what the oldest son meant.  The first-born is the miracle, brought from Heaven itself through the very gates of death, a pioneer, merciless and helpless, a little monarch whose kingdom never existed before the day he set up his feeble little cry.  All the delightful innovations are for him,—­the chair, the mug, the little airings, the remodeled domestic routine.

“Pain in his poor little tum!” Susan said cheerfully and tenderly, when the youthful Billy cried.  Under exactly similar circumstances, with Martin, she had shed tears of terror and despair, while Billy, shivering in his nightgown, had hung at the telephone awaiting her word to call the doctor.  Martin’s tawny, finely shaped little head, the grip of his sturdy, affectionate little arms, his early voyages into the uncharted sea of English speech,—­these were so many marvels to his mother and father.

But it had to be speedily admitted that Billy had his own particular charm too.  The two were in everything a sharp contrast.  Martin’s bright hair blew in loose waves, Billy’s dark curls fitted his head like a cap.  Martin’s eyes were blue and grave, Billy’s dancing and brown.  Martin used words carefully, with a nice sense of values, Billy achieved his purposes with stamping and dimpling, and early coined a tiny vocabulary of his own.  Martin slept flat on his small back, a muscular little viking drifting into unknown waters, but drowsiness must always capture Billy alive and fighting.  Susan untangled him nightly from his covers, loosened his small fingers from the bars of his crib.

She took her maternal responsibilities gravely.  Billy Senior thought it very amusing to see her, buttering a bowl for bread-pudding, or running small garments through her machine, while she recited “The Pied Piper” or “Goblin Market” to a rapt audience of two staring babies.  But somehow the sight was a little touching, too.

“Bill, don’t you honestly think that they’re smarter than other children, or is it just because they’re mine?” Susan would ask.  And Billy always answered in sober good faith, “No, it’s not you, dear, for I see it too!  And they really are unusual!”

Susan sometimes put both boys into the carriage and went to see Georgie, to whose group a silent, heavy little boy had now been added.  Mrs. O’Connor was a stout, complacent little person; the doctor’s mother was dead, and Georgie spoke of her with sad affection and reverence.  The old servant stayed on, tirelessly devoted to the new mistress, as she had been to the old, and passionately proud of the children.  Joe’s practice had grown enormously; Joe kept a runabout now, and on Sundays took his well-dressed wife out with him to the park.  They had a circle of friends very much like themselves, prosperous young fathers and mothers, and there was a pleasant rivalry in card-parties, and the dressing of little boys and girls.  Myra and Helen, colored ribbons tying their damp, straight, carefully ringletted hair, were a nicely mannered little pair, and the boy fat and sweet and heavy.