A Maid and a Million Men (Illustrated)

There was a party up in Heaven the night that I was born and my mother’s Guardian Angel was playing one of those now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don’t shell games with the Court Jester while the Head-Man so far forgot himself, under the influence of the chorus of angelic yessers, as to do sleight-of-hand tricks with the Vital Statistics and the Orders of the Day. The whole court laughed to see such sport and even my mother’s Guardian Angel must have thought it was a good joke on my father.
I heard the angels laughing as I came into the world and I cried out, as soon as I could, that it certainly didn’t take much to entertain some people. Angels have no sense of humor, anyway; I’ve since discovered that you have to go in the other direction if you want to appreciate good jokes. Why, up there in Heaven, the whole court thought this was a wow, judging by the celestial thunder-peals of glee which accompanied the parlor tricks, but if you can see anything funny in playing a trick like that on an unsuspecting couple of innocent young lovers who thought Birth Control was a pullman porter, then I hope you go to hell where red-hot jokes are the devil’s own sport!
Furthermore, the joke was not only on my parents, but also on us—for, you see, it happened that not only was I twins but also the other half of the consignment was a boy who should have been a girl while I was a girl who should have been a boy. The Head-Man certainly proved himself a magician; he scrambled our souls and temperaments and everything else so thoroughly that it would have required a better man than the Court Physician to put us together again as the Creator intended us to be, before that weak moment of kittenishness.
Even so, you’d think the Shipping Clerk would have hesitated at sending out a boy in a girl’s body and vice versa. Of course, the two bodies did look very much alike, but we were unashamedly naked at the time and you’d think that even a government clerk would notice something funny in such a parcel. Perhaps my Guardian Angel matched pennies or shot craps with the Clerk, and the latter may have rolled a natural for my brother and an even number for me. After seeing some of the other shipments that went out on my birthday, I’ll believe anything’s possible. I recently met a man, born on that same day, who sniffs like a rabbit, eats like a pig, walks like a woman and brays like an ass; and I know a woman who would be a cat if she had a tail. The Clerk must have been on the party, too, and maybe had a little too much nectar besides. Anyway, the Head-Man scrambled everything from frogs to elephants and nobody else unscrambled them, so if your birthday was mine you probably decided long ago that Heaven isn’t the most efficiently operated production plant that can be imagined. Even on good days, the service is rotten: nine times out of ten when you place an order for a boy you get a girl or vice versa—no wonder a lot of the circus freaks were born on my birthday!
My brother and I looked exactly alike. Indeed we were quite a biological achievement, because we even had identical moles in identical positions on our left cheeks. Father was actually quite proud of us and I think the burden of having twins was really responsible for his economic success, for he proceeded to accumulate more than enough money after we made our début in 1899. In fact, he became so successful that he never stayed long enough in any one city for us to become conspicuously familiar to even our nearest neighbors. He was always on the move, organizing new projects, developing new enterprises, rescuing his own and others’ investments and turning everything to profit. He was a hard-working man and he loved to keep busy, but I think that all that hustling around year after year had a lot to do with mother’s untimely death when we were only ten years old. She succumbed to typhoid fever, but that was only the last straw, for she had never really had a chance to get strong and healthy after we appeared on the scene.
After her death, the head of the house didn’t know what to do with us, it being obvious that he could not give us any care or attention and still keep up his program of industry; but he finally settled the problem by arranging a plan with our Aunt Elinor Canwick, his spinster sister, under the terms of which he provided liberally for us and for her on condition that she take charge of us and supervise our education. He gave Aunt Elinor carte blanche in all matters except one: he stipulated that we must receive, aside from whatever cultural finish she might provide, a thorough training in some practical occupation, in order that we might be able to earn a respectable living should our going to work become necessary through unfortunate circumstances. More specifically, he strongly advised that “they be trained in secretarial work,