In all, in truth, it was a problem for another day, Ivan decided. When life and chance handed you an afternoon as idyllic as this one promised to be,… - Lois McMaster Bujold

He stared at the two bundles more than filling his lap in a kind of cosmic amazement.
“We did it,” he muttered to Ekaterin, now perching on the chair arm. “Why didn’t anybody stop us? Why aren’t there more regulations about this sort of thing? What fool in their right mind would put me in charge of a baby? Two babies?”

We are all, every living one of us, doorways between the two realms, that of matter that gives us birth, and that of spirit into which we are born in death.

Devotion to duty, or pragmatic ruthlessness, which was which? He would never know, now.