Mrs. Holm Boddy rushed over with a copy of Poems Every Expectant Mother Ought to Know, and Lotta Munn sent a card of diamond safety pins.
Iva Payne, the hateful thing, sent a Cubist picture of an infant falling downstairs, but Warble couldn't make it out so its pre-natal influence didn't amount to much.
Daisy Snow, innocent child, sent a beautiful edition of How to Tell Your Young, a treatise of the bird-and-bee-seed-and-pollen school, and Faith Loveman sent her own marked copy of Cooks that Have Helped Me.
But Warble made a face at them all, and gave their books to the Salvation Army and read the Diary of Maggot Somebody.
Another fate slather.
The baby was twins.
That was the way things came to Warble—fate in big chunks—destiny in cloudbursts.
Two little red Petticoats all at once to hang on the ancestral tree.
But Warble was not caught napping. In her efficient way, she had provided two bassinets, two nurseries—in fact, she had really provided three of everything, but the third wasn't needed, and she thriftily ordered it put aside for the present and for the future.