Part 15 (2/2)

”Yep,” said the youth. ”And in the middle too. Right along through.

Never miss an opportunity, is as good a slogan as you'll get when it comes to tipping.”

”I believe you'd have liked Kipps,” said Anna-Felicitas meditatively, shaking some dust off her hat and remembering the orgy of tipping that immortal young man went in for at the seaside hotel.

”What I like now,” said the youth, growing more easy before their manifest youth and ignorance, ”is tips. Guess you can call it Kipps if it pleases you.”

Anna-Rose began to fumble nervously in her purse ”It's horrid, I think, to ask for presents,” she said to the youth in deep humiliation, more on his account than hers.

”Presents? I'm not asking for presents. I'm telling you what's done,”

said the youth. And he had spots on his face. And he was repugnant to her.

Anna-Rose gave him what looked like a s.h.i.+lling. He took it, and remarking that he had had a lot of trouble over it, went away; and Anna-Rose was still flushed by this encounter when Mr. Twist knocked and asked if they were ready to be taken down to tea.

”He might have said thank you,” she said indignantly to Anna-Felicitas, giving a final desperate brus.h.i.+ng to the sulphur.

”I expect he'll come to a bad end,” said Anna-Felicitas soothingly.

They had tea in the restaurant and were the only people doing such a thing, a solitary cl.u.s.ter in a wilderness of empty tables laid for dinner. It wasn't the custom much in America, explained Mr. Twist, to have tea, and no preparations were made for it in hotels of that sort.

The very waiters, feeling it was a meal to be discouraged, were showing their detachment from it by sitting in a corner of the room playing dominoes. It was a big room, all looking-gla.s.ses and windows, and the street outside was badly paved and a great noise of pa.s.sing motor-vans came in and drowned most of what Mr. Twist was saying. It was an unlovely place, a place in which one might easily feel homesick and that the world was empty of affection, if one let oneself go that way. The twins wouldn't. They stoutly refused, in their inward recesses, to be daunted by these externals. For there was Mr. Twist, their friend and stand-by, still with them, and hadn't they got each other? But they felt uneasy all the same; for Mr. Twist, though he plied them with b.u.t.tered toast and macaroons and was as attentive as usual, had a somnambulatory quality in his attention. He looked like a man who is doing things in a dream. He looked like one who is absorbed in something else. His forehead still was puckered, and what could it be puckered about, seeing that he had got home, and was going back to his mother, and had a clear and uncomplicated future ahead of him, and anyhow was a man?

”Have you got something on your mind?” asked Anna-Rose at last, when he hadn't even heard a question she asked,--he, the polite, the interested, the sympathetic friend of the journey across.

Mr. Twist, sitting tilted back in his chair, his hands deep in his pockets, looked up from the macaroons he had been staring at and said, ”Yes.”

”Tell us what it is,” suggested Anna-Felicitas.

”You,” said Mr. Twist.

”Me?”

”Both of you. You both of you go together. You're in one lump in my mind. And on it too,” finished Mr. Twist ruefully.

”That's only because,” explained Anna-Felicitas, ”you've got the idea we want such a lot of taking care of. Get rid of that, and you'll feel quite comfortable again. Why not regard us merely as pleasant friends?”

Mr. Twist looked at her in silence.

”Not as objects to be protected,” continued Anna Felicitas, ”but as co-equals. Of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.”

Mr. Twist continued to look at her in silence.

”We didn't come to America to be on anybody's mind,” said Anna-Rose, supporting Anna-Felicitas.

”We had a good deal of that in England,” said Anna-Felicitas. ”For instance, we're quite familiar with Uncle Arthur's mind, we were on it so heavily and so long.”

”It's our fixed determination,” said Anna-Rose, ”now that we're starting a new life, to get off any mind we find ourselves on _instantly_.”

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