little cheek where the dimple was, or he would lift his eyes from the Culture book and suddenly see the dark softness of Anna-Felicitas’s eyelashes as she slept in her chair.  But now, dressed properly, and in their dryland condition of cheerful animation, he perceived that they were very pretty indeed, and that Anna-Felicitas was more than very pretty.  He couldn’t help thinking they were a most unsuitable couple to be let loose in America with only two hundred pounds to support them.  Two hundred pounds was just enough to let them slip about if it should enter their heads to slip about,—­go off without explanation, for instance, if they wanted to leave the Clouston Sacks,—­but of course ridiculous as a serious background to life.  A girl should either have enough money or be completely dependent on her male relations.  As a girl was usually young reflected Mr. Twist, his spectacles with the Broadway lights in them blazing on the two specimens opposite him, it was safest for her to be dependent.  So were her actions controlled, and kept within the bounds of wisdom.

And next morning, as he sat waiting for the twins for breakfast at ten o’clock according to arrangement the night before, their grape-fruit in little beds of ice on their plates and every sort of American dish ordered, from griddle cakes and molasses to chicken pie, a page came in with loud cries for Mr. Twist, which made him instantly conspicuous—­a thing he particularly disliked—­and handed him a letter.

The twins had gone.

CHAPTER XIII

They had left early that morning for Boston, determined, as they wrote, no longer to trespass on his kindness.  There had been a discussion in their bedroom the night before when they got back in which Anna-Rose supplied the heat and Anna-Felicitas the arguments, and it ended in Anna-Felicitas succeeding in restoring Anna-Rose to her original standpoint of proud independence, from which, lured by the comfort and security of Mr. Twist’s companionship, she had been inclined to slip.

It took some time, because of Anna-Rose being the eldest.  Anna-Felicitas had had to be as wary, and gentle, and persistently affectionate as a wife whom necessity compels to try and get reason into her husband.  Anna-Rose’s feathers, even as the feathers of a husband, bristled at the mere breath of criticism of her superior intelligence and wisdom.  She was the leader of the party, the head and guide, the one who had the dollars in her pocket, and being the eldest naturally must know best.  Besides, she was secretly nervous about taking Anna-Felicitas about alone.  She too had observed the stares of the public, and had never supposed that any of them might be for her.  How was she to get to Boston successfully with so enchanting a creature, through all the complications of travel in an unknown country, without the support and counsel of Mr. Twist?  Just the dollars and quarters and dimes and cents cowed her.  The strangeness of everything, while it delighted her so long as she could peep at it from behind Mr. Twist, appalled her the minute she was left alone with it.  America seemed altogether a foreign country, a strange place whose inhabitants by accident didn’t talk in a strange language.  They talked English; or rather what sounded like English till you found that it wasn’t really.